When John Barry composed this magnificent work, one of his more surprising and original, he is already an author of renown and recognized international reputation. After his successes as songs' arranger and author, and the box office bombs that supposed the first movies of James Bond -especially Goldfinger (1964)-, Barry starts to work with the former actor and now director Bryan Forbes in the stupendous The L-Shaped Room (1963), to chain a series of very stupendous common projects that peak in Deadfall (1968). In the middle is located The Whisperers (1966), a awarded dramatic film of psychological dyes that includes a superb interpretation of its old protagonist, Edith Evans, and this curious and different score of the British composer. Now that Barry seems to maintain a regular line of soft and somber sound, it results especially interesting to find again this forgotten music that Ryko has recovered in a perfect edition that includes, as all their disks, a small multimedia part (in this occasion, a short scene of the movie). Barry's music, based on its practical whole in a theme of three notes that form a semitone movement stated at the beginning of the work, makes use of atonal registers and arid passages radically opposed to the parameters which he has us currently accustomed, designing to the perfection the peculiar vital environment of the protagonist. M.A.F.

/ RYKO RCD10720 / 32'