This week's soundtrack reviewed

ALBERTO IGLESIAS

Che Varese Sarabande*****

Best known for his collaboration with director Pedro Almodóvar ( Live Flesh, Talk to Her, Volver), Alberto Iglesias began scoring English-language films with the Oscar-nominated The Constant Gardener and The Kite Runner.

The Spanish composer's new score to Steve Soderberg's two-part biopic is an exceptional career high. Combining modernist, jazz and folk motifs and taut melodies with spare orchestration, dark instrumental colours (guitar, winds, horns, cellos), angular polyrhythms and brooding electronica, Iglesias creates an intricate and dense score of remarkable power, at once coolly formal and yet urgently lyrical. His mercurial shifts between the epic and the intimate infuse his astonishing score with a surprising historical sweep and psychological complexity. For all its effortless virtuosic experimentalism, Che possesses an extraordinary force and intensity. www.colosseum.de

Download Tracks: Ambush, La Higuera