R_T, I guess whoever it is must have contractual obligations beyond the Signum label. A sort of Paul Procopolis situation.

No further information anywhere, R_T. Not in the booklet, nor the liner, nor, indeed, on the Internet. I might ask Michael next time I bump into him, but it's not that important. For all I know, it might be the man himself, mutitracked, a solution also considered by Kenneth Walton in his review of the disc in The Scotsman. ;-)

A while since you watched it, eh, R_T? The ensemble playing on the soundtrack is rather larger than the Balanescu Quartet alone. It includes piano and reeds (single and double) too, and eupho, in fact, pretty much standard Nyman Band of the time. What a pity the film's budget didn't run to stereo sound. "In the land of the legless, the one legged woman is queen". ;-)

Just got to the squid, by the way. "M" is for monkey.

Mr G, as a Member of the middle generation we had hitherto eschewed the posting of these images for fear of irrevocably warping younger sensibilities. Indeed the mere static image conveys little of the joy that Senor Dali's surrealistic parade offers up for our delectation.

(We are away from our domestic Clavier and are thus precluded from providing the diacriticals essential for a typographically accurate representation of the filmmaker's name. We beg the indulgence of our fellow Members.)

Perhaps we can nonetheless offer the information that at a point in the film a gentleman with much apparent effort drags into the room a piano



on which has been placed a beast of burden which has had better days



and which is followed by two surprised-looking Gentlemen of the Cloth.



We commend Senor Dali's film to those on 3 who thought they had perhaps seen everything.

Oh, you mean this one?!!  - (note the irony of the smiley!!!)

As I said earlier, there are pieces which work well and others which deserve scorn. It would perhaps be more instructive to differentiate the two. Or perhaps you know ALL his work and think it's ALL crap. If so, say so. Having been a fellow-student doesn't stregthen your post.

The difference is that Vettriano doesn't know any better, whereas Nyman does. It's certainly easy to come to the conclusion that there are two Nymans - the one who wrote the Experimental Music book, some experimental pieces and the rough-and ready minimalism of the early 1980s; and the one who writes the musically-threadbare stuff that in my opinion began with the Draughtsman's Contract soundtrack (perhaps significantly, the moment when his music reached a large audience for the first time). When I met MN for the only time in 1981 he struck me as rather a cynical kind of person who affected a disdain for the pretention and pseudointellectualism of contemporary music. It seems to me that this cynicism has become ingrained to the point where he believes it to be something positive (like Blair's famed "convictions", if I may be allowed a cynical aside of my own), while the work takes on the appearance of an empty shell of music with nothing inside it.