Director Alfonso Cuarón calls Tavener's "Fragments of a Prayer" "a spiritual comment rather than a narrative support." The results may be a bit unconventional, but they're undeniably powerful and well suited to this moving, bleak movie, whose only hint of redemption comes in the last few moments.

There's nothing "cool" or retro about Cuarón's future totalitarian Britain. The saddest thing about it is that is the future we probably deserve. We should fall to our knees and pray that it doesn't happen. It's 2027, in London, and the human race is dying out. Women have been infertile for 18 years. Schools are abandoned. No one cares much about anything. Why should they? There really is no future, as the Sex Pistols once tried to tell us. This is the downbeat future as envisioned by Sid Vicious.

A different soundtrack experience

As if to underscore the poignancy of this situation, John Tavener has crafted a score out of a piece called "Fragments of a Prayer," which is used sparingly throughout the movie during scenes of hope or sorrow. This piece, hauntingly performed by mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, is tremendously effective in addition to being strangely compelling. It is a 15-minute vocal work for soprano soloist and string orchestra. In it are included, sparingly, deep despairing notes on Tibetan temple bells.

Tavener wouldn't have been at the top of anyone's list to score a motion picture. He was, after all, the composer selected by the British government to write the spiritual and moving music for Princess Diana's funeral. That's stature, and that work, "Eternity's Sunshine," is the second selection on this disk. His conversion to Greek Orthodoxy has resulted in his compositional work becoming increasingly slow, thoughtful and vocally oriented. "Fragments of a Prayer," composed for the film, shows this, but Tavener's other included works are no less spiritually infused.

All of the other works are classical in nature, which balances the edgy pop of the "official" soundtrack quite nicely. Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1951-61)" is the most "modern" in terms of its abrasive nature, with dissonant, hypertonal strings and dense, churning chords. Handel's "War, He Sung, Is Toil and Trouble" is from his 1736 opera Alexander's Feast. It features a sort of "doodley-deedley" harpsichord melody with chipper vocal and lilting strings. Mahler's "Nun Will Die Sonn' So Hell Aufgeh" is the first movement of a melodramatic 1901 song cycle, sung here in the original German.