Shine

An original piece by Hirschfelder that opens the soundtrack album. Its title tells us, before anything else, where the film's title came from.

• Hirschfelder's underscore sets the piano at its center and lays strings and harp over it. It sounds like a deliberate choice not to stand out among the classical masterpieces played on the same instrument.
• The original music is said to make up less than half of the album. Even so, this underscore earned nominations for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for best score. Both prizes went to Gabriel Yared for 「The English Patient」.
• In Australia it won the AACTA Award for Best Original Music Score and the APRA Award for film music. The keyboardist of a pop band had, in effect, won recognition for a film about classical music.
• The bright, hopeful melody points to David's dreams and imagination. Keep in mind how this brightness later darkens, and the cues that follow will speak more clearly.

The scene in which the young David plays Chopin at the eisteddfod. On the album this piece is followed immediately by a short cue, 「Did He Win?」, which depicts the wait for the competition's result.

• The polonaise is a dance in triple meter that originated at the Polish court. Its hallmark is a rhythm that advances with the stately dignity of a procession.
• Having left his native Poland to live in Paris, Chopin poured his longing for home into his polonaises. The setup of an immigrant father from Poland making his son play this piece resonates on top of that.
• The album track is brief, a little over 1 minute 20 seconds. The film keeps its gaze less on the whole piece than on the child's hands and the father's face.

The passage in which David, in London, throws himself into the concerto called a monster. The album gives a separate track to the cadenza of the first movement, the heart of this concerto.

• In the cadenza (a passage where the soloist alone displays virtuosity), the orchestra stops and only the piano remains. David's plight, wrestling alone with an enormous piece, maps directly onto the musical form.
• Rachmaninoff left two cadenzas for this first movement. One is a version with thick, heavy chords; the other is lighter and faster. The composer himself chose the lighter one for his recording. Which one to play is considered a point on which pianists divide.
• The first theme of the first movement is a simple melody of only a few notes. Some suggested it was taken from a Russian chant, but Rachmaninoff stated that he had borrowed it from nowhere. It is worth following how that simple melody swells to enormous proportions in the cadenza.
• The concerto was dedicated to the pianist Josef Hofmann, but Hofmann is said never to have performed it on the public stage.

The music for the scene in which sound drains away at the climax of the Royal College of Music competition. The concerto and Hirschfelder's electronic sounds mingle within a single track.

• Beneath the concerto's grand sound lies a sustained tone (a drone) made from electronic sound. This low hum sounds like pressure resonating inside the performer's ears and body.
• As the orchestra recedes, only the dull resonance of the keystrokes and the sound of breathing remain. Because it heightens tension by subtracting music, the scene is often cited when people speak of the power of silence in film music.
• Only when you listen with the film's scene in mind does this track's meaning fully come alive.
• It is the moment when the piece the father dreamed of breaks the son. The same melody that once meant hope now comes to mean the price.

The scene in which David, back at the restaurant, pours this piece out before the diners is the best-known moment in the film. The playing is Helfgott's recording; the hands on the keys belong to Geoffrey Rush.

• The original is a short orchestral interlude from Rimsky-Korsakov's opera “The Tale of Tsar Saltan,” written for the moment when the prince turns into a bee and flies away. The soundtrack album carries the arrangement (transcription) Rachmaninoff made for piano. Once again, the name that threads through this film is Rachmaninoff.
• A chromatic scale (a scale that touches every white and black key of the piano in turn), climbing and falling by tightly packed half steps, runs on without pause and paints the beating of the bee's wings.
• The film's first draft was titled “Flight of the Bumble Bee.” From the very start, the director saw this piece as the emblem of his hero.
• It is worth hearing alongside the piano duel in “The Legend of 1900,” also in this series. Both films use flying fingers not as a display of virtuosity but as a way to lay bare a character's inner life.

This Vivaldi motet plays as David, in his overcoat, leaps on a trampoline. On the album it is sung by the soprano Jane Edwards and placed as the final track.

• It is the opening number of Vivaldi's motet (a solo·choral piece on a sacred text) RV 630. The Latin title means, roughly, that there is no true peace in this world. Yet the music itself flows on, calm and serene. That mismatch between title and sound lends the scene a strange depth.
• The slow, rocking rhythm matches the body's rise into the air and its fall back down. Because this is one of the few passages where no piano is heard at all, the sense of release lands all the harder.
• Britain's classical station Classic FM recalled that for some time after the film, this piece was inseparable from the image of an Australian man on a trampoline. It is a case of a single film breathing new life into a half-forgotten Baroque vocal work.