Romantic Flight

Where "Test Drive" describes the exhilaration of discovery, "Romantic Flight" is what comes after: the ease of two beings who have learned to move as one, the music finding a more lyrical, expansive quality belonging to late-afternoon light and settled trust. Powell's composition is built around a single, unhurried melodic line that the orchestra develops with the patience of someone who knows the destination isn't the point — the traveling is. The instrumentation favors warm strings and woodwinds over the more percussive energy of Test Drive, the harmonic language softer, more open, the tempo slower than the heartbeat of excitement, closer to the rhythm of contentment. There is a specific emotional register that film scores can reach that songs cannot — pure non-verbal communication of melody and orchestration without the interpretive constraint of language — and "Romantic Flight" operates in that register with considerable skill. The Celtic folk influence remains audible but is more attenuated, the Scandinavian-inflected melodic material smoothed into something more universally associated with the wordless feeling of a perfect afternoon. Powell allows the music to breathe in ways that scoring rarely permits, trusting the silence between phrases to carry weight. Best experienced as the last thing before sleep, headphones in, letting the music take the tempo of your breathing.