Anthony Hopkins releases his first CD, Composer, next week in the UK on the Classic FM label. You can hear all nine tracks in their entirety on the Telegraph’s website starting today, however. It’s easy to write off such discs as these in the same category as classical attempts by Billy Joel and Paul McCartney, but I find something rather beguiling about Hopkins’s compositional style. There’s a clear trajectory in the 5 minutes of Orpheus, and it takes the time to navigate from Hans Zimmer to Richard Strauss in bombastic brass and soothing chorals, a sort of Hollywood-esque Confutatis and Voca Me in the Mozart Requiem. Hopkins moves into lusher, more Romantic territory in the warm cello work Stella, before going full folk in Evesham Fair. Perhaps And the Waltz Goes On treads too far into cliche, but it’s no less enjoyable to hear alongside organ-tainted Amerika and the full-length, three-movement 1947. What I can’t stop listening to on this gloomy, wet day, however, is Margam, a piece that belies Hopkins’s history as a broody thesp (with some tinseltown violins thrown in for added glamor), one who left me enthralled after his performance in the BBC’s miniseries adaptation of War & Peace.
It may not be the most profound thing you’ll hear all year—especially coming the day after I marvelled to the multiculti assemblage of solo harp works performed by Bridget Kibbey at (Le) Poisson Rouge last night (she repeats the concert on Sunday, go if you haven’t already…and even if you have)—but I wouldn’t mind seeing Hopkins’s name on a New York Philharmonic program, perhaps cozied up to some more 20- and 30-something composers, per Zachary Woolfe’s emphatic and essential New York Times piece.
