Suffragette [LP]

On his score for Suffragette, Oscar-, BAFTA-, Golden Globe-, and Grammy-winning composer Alexandre Desplat (The Grand Budapest Hotel, The King's Speech) offers un-nostalgic orchestral accompaniment to the period film, a 2015 U.K. production about the turn-of-the-20th-century women's suffrage movement in Britain. A musical shape-shifter, here Desplat imparts the urgency at the heart of the film above all else, with unresolved chords, climbing progressions, and a pulsing low-end via, most prominently, percussion, strings, piano, and horns. From the gently ominous waltz of "Demonstration" to the trembling high-pitched strings of "Child Taken," the score is quiet but tense and, as always, well-suited. ~ Marcy Donelson