Tarkovsky -5 CD Box Set (Cold Spring) 2026
“Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could listen to them properly, cinema would have no need for music at all.”
Andrei Tarkovsky
“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”
John Cage
Tarkovsky didn’t care for conventional film music. He generally favoured natural sounds, electronic music, samples of classical music and folk to create a probing soundscape that complimented his visionary filmmaking. On the five films in this CD set he worked with the composers Vyacheslave Ovchinnikov and Eduard Artemyev. Their contribution to film music is radical, questioning and as innovative and startling as Tarkovsky’s sensual imagery. Unlike the over-immersive experience of spectacle you sense in too many films today Tarkovsky’s films are a thoughtful re-immersive encounter with levels of reality, hyper-reality and poetry. They convey an interiority and reflection. Often dream-like, mystical and philosophical Tarkovsky’s cinema is hard to pin down as it can be both dense and enigmatic and equally transparent and illuminating. This tension between not quite knowing what is happening, with a sense that each happening is fulfilling and profound, is aided hugely by one haunting sound after another.
Ivan’s Childhood (the first disc in this box set) still remains one of the most powerful films about a child in wartime I’ve ever seen. The opening music cue is described as Ivan’s first dream and describes dreams about his mother. And the final cue, the film’s epilogue, returns us to the time of Ivan’s pre-war boyhood. Ovchinnikov’s often lyrical and accessible music portrays these states. Yet in between are placed the poetic use of machine gun fire (Berlin 1945 track) and the strangely shimmering music of the flooded forest scene. Over frequent viewings of Ivan’s Childhood those moments have stayed with me aurally as much as visually. Like in a good poem sound and sense work in harmony.
Ovchinnikov’s music for Andrei Roublev is next and its celestial sounds of a bell and chamber orchestra pulled me right back in to the film’s extraordinary opening shot: an aerial view of a hot air balloon flying over the countryside. The bell returns later on but what predominates is some beautiful choral writing: a haunting wordless female solo, track three’s sung accompaniment to a great procession on the road and the final blazing chorus called Colours of Icons. The influence of Russian Orthodox church music and Prokofiev’s scores for Eisenstein are apparent. It’s moving, dramatic and incorporated with apocalyptic blocks of sound akin to an iron foundry workshop, as throughout this narrative of Roublev, an icon painter of the 1400’s, runs the secondary story of the making of a great bell. This is a rich grand tapestry of a score.
Solaris was scored by Eduard Artemyev and his arrangements of Bach’s organ chorale prelude BVW 639 and prelude and Fugue in f minor BWV 881 are mixed with highly effective electronic music. The first manifestation of the strange woman, named Hari, in the spacecraft is conveyed by a electronic drone sound and much reverberating bass. Her subsequent return brings a wordless female soprano to the soundtrack. We also hear a xylophone alongside Bach to suggest weightlessness; the barking of a pack of dogs placed over Breughel’s painting Hunters in the Snow; much steely and slithering electronics describing the space station and a 2001 like storm- voyage of sound effects in The Islands of the Ocean sequence. Solaris’s soundscape is a beautiful, disorientating and unearthly musical pallet of longing, loss, time and memory.
The soundtracks for Mirror and Stalker are similar in technique and production to Solaris and form a trilogy of the electronics of Eduard Artemyev. Mirror consists of fragments, very brief music cues that seal up the elliptical editing of a film so concerned with time and memory both personal and historical. And Bach features once more at the film’s climax with the opening chorus of his St. John Passion. Less sparse and edgy than Mirror is Artemyev’s Stalker soundscape. The natural and repetitive sounds, of journeying through water and by train, is a constant motif along with a haunting electronic cry creating a tunnel effect that assists the spiritual quest undertaken in Tarkovsky’s SF allegory.
If you have seen Tarkovsky’s films then to isolate their soundscapes from the films is to experience a kind of musical purity which can stand powerfully alone from Tarkovsky’s wonderful imagery. Although even allowing for listening in the dark scenes from the films inevitably surface in your mind. My only caveat with this set is a complete lack of liner notes, information about track cues (mine were gained from Google AI) and track timings. Otherwise I’m both delighted and excited that Cold Spring have made such arresting and often grippingly abstract music available.
Alan Price©2026
Tarkovsky -5 CD Box Set (Cold Spring) 2026
“Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could listen to them properly, cinema would have no need for music at all.”
Andrei Tarkovsky
“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”
John Cage
Tarkovsky didn’t care for conventional film music. He generally favoured natural sounds, electronic music, samples of classical music and folk to create a probing soundscape that complimented his visionary filmmaking. On the five films in this CD set he worked with the composers Vyacheslave Ovchinnikov and Eduard Artemyev. Their contribution to film music is radical, questioning and as innovative and startling as Tarkovsky’s sensual imagery. Unlike the over-immersive experience of spectacle you sense in too many films today Tarkovsky’s films are a thoughtful re-immersive encounter with levels of reality, hyper-reality and poetry. They convey an interiority and reflection. Often dream-like, mystical and philosophical Tarkovsky’s cinema is hard to pin down as it can be both dense and enigmatic and equally transparent and illuminating. This tension between not quite knowing what is happening, with a sense that each happening is fulfilling and profound, is aided hugely by one haunting sound after another.
Ivan’s Childhood (the first disc in this box set) still remains one of the most powerful films about a child in wartime I’ve ever seen. The opening music cue is described as Ivan’s first dream and describes dreams about his mother. And the final cue, the film’s epilogue, returns us to the time of Ivan’s pre-war boyhood. Ovchinnikov’s often lyrical and accessible music portrays these states. Yet in between are placed the poetic use of machine gun fire (Berlin 1945 track) and the strangely shimmering music of the flooded forest scene. Over frequent viewings of Ivan’s Childhood those moments have stayed with me aurally as much as visually. Like in a good poem sound and sense work in harmony.
Ovchinnikov’s music for Andrei Roublev is next and its celestial sounds of a bell and chamber orchestra pulled me right back in to the film’s extraordinary opening shot: an aerial view of a hot air balloon flying over the countryside. The bell returns later on but what predominates is some beautiful choral writing: a haunting wordless female solo, track three’s sung accompaniment to a great procession on the road and the final blazing chorus called Colours of Icons. The influence of Russian Orthodox church music and Prokofiev’s scores for Eisenstein are apparent. It’s moving, dramatic and incorporated with apocalyptic blocks of sound akin to an iron foundry workshop, as throughout this narrative of Roublev, an icon painter of the 1400’s, runs the secondary story of the making of a great bell. This is a rich grand tapestry of a score.
Solaris was scored by Eduard Artemyev and his arrangements of Bach’s organ chorale prelude BVW 639 and prelude and Fugue in f minor BWV 881 are mixed with highly effective electronic music. The first manifestation of the strange woman, named Hari, in the spacecraft is conveyed by a electronic drone sound and much reverberating bass. Her subsequent return brings a wordless female soprano to the soundtrack. We also hear a xylophone alongside Bach to suggest weightlessness; the barking of a pack of dogs placed over Breughel’s painting Hunters in the Snow; much steely and slithering electronics describing the space station and a 2001 like storm- voyage of sound effects in The Islands of the Ocean sequence. Solaris’s soundscape is a beautiful, disorientating and unearthly musical pallet of longing, loss, time and memory.
The soundtracks for Mirror and Stalker are similar in technique and production to Solaris and form a trilogy of the electronics of Eduard Artemyev. Mirror consists of fragments, very brief music cues that seal up the elliptical editing of a film so concerned with time and memory both personal and historical. And Bach features once more at the film’s climax with the opening chorus of his St. John Passion. Less sparse and edgy than Mirror is Artemyev’s Stalker soundscape. The natural and repetitive sounds, of journeying through water and by train, is a constant motif along with a haunting electronic cry creating a tunnel effect that assists the spiritual quest undertaken in Tarkovsky’s SF allegory.
If you have seen Tarkovsky’s films then to isolate their soundscapes from the films is to experience a kind of musical purity which can stand powerfully alone from Tarkovsky’s wonderful imagery. Although even allowing for listening in the dark scenes from the films inevitably surface in your mind. My only caveat with this set is a complete lack of liner notes, information about track cues (mine were gained from Google AI) and track timings. Otherwise I’m both delighted and excited that Cold Spring have made such arresting and often grippingly abstract music available.
Alan Price©2026
By Alan Price • added recently on London Grip, film, music • Tags: Alan Price, film, music