Silva Screen Records release Max Richter’s emotive and minimal score to Damon Lindelof’s TV series about a post-apocalyptic global event. With a Biblical theme in the background, the premise of The Leftovers is the Doomsday, known as “sudden departure”, with only two percent of the World’s population vanishing and leaving behind chaos, angst and confusion. Based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name and produced by Lost’s Damon Lindelof, The Leftovers focuses on the Garvey family and follows the lives of the remaining citizens of Mapleton, NY, three years after the event...

Max Richter's score for The Leftovers is both beautiful and melancholic. The music has been designed to show the feelings of the show's Garvey family through intimate, small scale music, while the psychological landscape is represented by bringing a ritual quality to the score. To show departure, the composer has chosen to represent decay through sound, relying on instrumentation with a few sustained tones and using pianos, harps and celesta.

It's a bizarre sounding score that works well as a standalone project - you don't need the onscreen imagery to picture your own interpretation of events.

For some reason I couldn't help but be reminded of the music for ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989 2013) / Granada Television's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-1994) when listening to the opening 'The Leftovers Main Title Theme'. In addition, 'Illuminations Clouds' has a hint of Gabriel Fauré's 'In Paradisum' from his Requiem in D minor, Op. 48.

The rest of the score delivers plenty of interesting themes. If you're a fan of beautiful, melancholic scores, then you'll find lots to appreciate here.

8

Darren Rea