THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD – ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK
By Christopher Willis
Digital release 17th January 2020 / CD/Vinyl 24th January 2020 on MVKA
Armando Iannucci (Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, In the Loop, Veep, The Death of Stalin) turns to multi-award-winning British composer Christopher Willis to score his new film THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD. With its contemporary neoclassical aesthetic infused with echoes of the great British symphonic tradition, and performed by the 2019 RPS award-winning Aurora Orchestra, the score has already attracted rave reviews:
“… the forward-rushing camera’s momentum underscored by Christopher Willis’s shamelessly neoclassical (and, honestly, disarmingly lovely) string-heavy score” Filmmaker Magazine
“… Christopher Willis’ charming orchestral score sweeps us along…” OfAllTheFilmSites
“…all of it set to a whimsical, soaring score courtesy of Christopher Willis.” /Film
“… a stunning score by @mrchriswillis, astonishingly well played by @auroraorchestra (dazzling [violin solo by] Alexandra Wood)” Howard Goodall
Christopher Willis is a frequent Iannucci collaborator, having composed the music to the multi-Emmy®-winning HBO sitcom Veep, as well as the multi-award-winning film satire The Death of Stalin. His Soviet-inspired soundtrack to the latter received great critical acclaim (“one of the greatest film music debuts, I think, of all time” – Cinematic Sound Radio) and was shortlisted for the 2018 Academy Award for Best Original Score, as well as being awarded Best Original Score for a Comedy Film at the 2017 International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) Awards.
Adapted from the classic novel by Charles Dickens, THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD brings to life one of the author’s most cherished characters. From birth to infancy, from adolescence to adulthood, the good-hearted David Copperfield (Dev Patel) is surrounded by kindness, wickedness, poverty and wealth, as he meets an array of remarkable characters in Victorian England. As David sets out to be a writer, in his quest for family, friendship, romance and status, the story of his life is the most seductive tale of all.
With its spiky humour and colour-blind casting, the film is not your average Dickens adaptation: the cobwebs have been dusted off the great book, and its brilliance and humanity given a new immediacy. In a parallel way, the film’s soundtrack is no period piece but is unabashedly contemporary and neoclassical. “The film is very bright and luminous, and absolutely full of generosity and joy,” Willis has said, “and the score is the same – not sepia-tinged. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of propulsion and a lot of optimism.”
The score is unmistakably British in tone. A former musicologist (he has a PhD in historical musicology from Cambridge University), Willis undertook considerable research to connect his music with a specifically a British symphonic tradition. “Armando has said that he wants the film to celebrate Britain, and I felt that the score, too, should place us gently but firmly on British soil, as it were, and so I spent a good deal of time listening and thinking about the British classical tradition, roughly from Elgar and Delius right up to the current scene. As someone who’s from Britain but has been living and working in LA for over a decade, this is probably the first time in my life that I’ve thought about myself as a British composer, and you can definitely hear the score as an attempt on my part to reconnect with those roots.”
The soundtrack was recorded by Aurora Orchestra, winners of the 2019 RPS Ensemble Award, under the baton of Principal Conductor Nicholas Collon. This is the continuation of a long friendship between Christopher Willis and the orchestra. “In Aurora’s early years they commissioned a substantial educational project from me,” he says, “which they went on to use in many, many schools around the country. I had always wanted to repay the favour by employing Aurora on a film someday. It’s all the more delightful that David Copperfield gave me the opportunity to do that, because I wanted a sound for this score that’s both very English and very exciting, and Aurora have absolutely that sound. I think their playing on the soundtrack is just wonderful.”
Tracklisting – ‘The Personal History of David Copperfield – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack’
- My Own Story
- Baby Davy
- Yarmouth
- Last Days of Innocence
- The Murdstones
- The Bottling Factory
- I Fall Into Disgrace
- A Corker of a Corker
- Without a Home
- 23 Miles to Dover
- Notes and Impressions
- A Blissful Summer
- First Day at School
- Mr. Dick and the Kite
- Agnes
- Tall Tales
- Uriah Heep
- Of Kites and Concertinas
- Leaving Day
- Meeting Dora
- Adventures of a London Gentleman
- Mock Turtle
- Ruined
- Mounting Troubles
- Return To Yarmouth
- Steerforth Mucks In
- Emily Gone
- The Search for Emily
- David’s Writings
- The Shipwreck
- Concluding Words
- A Life Well Written
- These Pages Must Show (End Credits)
Media enquiries to: info@republicmedia.net / +44 20 3213 0135
About Christopher Willis
Born in Australia, Christopher Willis grew up in the UK and earned his BA in Music at Clare College, Cambridge. He went on to study piano performance with American pianist Aaron Shorr at the Royal Academy of Music, before returning to Cambridge University to study music analysis with W. Dean Sutcliffe, completing a PhD on the keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti. While at Cambridge he also worked as a teacher of harmony and counterpoint. In 2007 he relocated to California to pursue a career in film music, and worked in the studios of several major film composers, including Rupert Gregson-Williams, Harry Gregson-Williams, Henry Jackman, and Carter Burwell, before embarking on his own career as a television and film composer.
A self-described “eternal music student”, his compositional output has been very diverse, united by his deep desire to learn about music in all its forms. From 2012 until the present, this appetite has found an ideal outlet in five seasons of Disney Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts, which take place in many locations and embrace a dizzying array of styles. Similarly, his epic score for Disney Junior’s hit series The Lion Guard involved a deep immersion in the music of sub-Saharan Africa. His work for television has earned two Emmy nominations and he is the five-time winner of the Annie Award for Music in a Television/Broadcast Production. In 2020, his music will feature in Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, an all-new attraction at Disney World, Florida, with the ride coming to Disneyland, California in 2022. His concert music has been performed at the BBC Proms Festival and on BBC Radio 3, and he has written various musicological articles, as well as a chapter in the book Domenico Scarlatti Adventures.
Press Release from Republic Media.
