Plaza Mayor Company release Yoshihiro Hanno's score for Mountains May Depart. China, 1999. Childhood friends Liangzi and Zhang are both in love with Tao, the town beauty. Tao eventually decides to marry the wealthier Zhang and they soon have a son they name Dollar. From China to Australia, the lives, loves, hopes and disillusions of a family over two generations is explored in a society changing at breakneck speed...

Yoshihiro Hanno's score for Mountains May Depart is a wonderful little score which packs quite a lot of interesting themes into its run time. The album contains 13 tracks (58 min, 04 sec). The music stradles the fine line between score and classical music. No where is this more obvious than in the closing track 'Platform variation' (10 min, 28 sec).

It works well as a standalone album. It's a wonderful, melancholic score which is well worth picking up whether you've seen the movie or not.

9

Darren Rea