Plaza Mayor Company release the soundtrack album for The Life Ahead, with music composed by Gabriel Yared. The movie sees a Holocaust survivor, who runs a daycare business, form an unlikely friendship with a bitter street kid when she takes him in after he robs her...

Gabriel Yared is a composer whose body of work is impressive and quality is almost always guaranteed to delight. So it was with much pleasure that I sat down to listen to his latest work for director Edoardo Ponti's The Life Ahead. It's an incredibly sweet and melancholic score that dredges up a lot of raw emotion.

Talking about the project Gabriel Yared said: "I began my work on The Life Ahead shortly after it was shot, but it was not yet fully edited or completed. Edoardo Ponti came to see me in Paris in December 2019 to discuss what he was after in terms of the music. I watched the film and loved it straight away. It has a gentle sweetness and melancholia, which is very unique. I firstly started working on my themes, which I shared with Edoardo, and then I gradually adapted them to specific scenes. The most important theme was the “Hebraic Song”, which Edoardo calls the DNA of the film. This is a piece that Madame Rosa listens to in her cellar, reminding her of her parents and childhood memories in Auschwitz."

I was reminded of John Williams's score for Schindler's List when listening to the later segment of 'Madame Rosa'. while 'The Life Ahead' and 'Illness' had a theme that reminded me of Jason Graves's score for the VR game Moss.

It's a very short score, containing 12 tracks and coming in at just 21 min, 55 sec. But it's such a beautiful little score that you'll find that it's worth adding to your collection.

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Darren Rea