Stirring Sinister Strings

April 28, 2021

Alexis Maingaud’s score to 2020 Supernatural Thriller THE SONATA Coming Out On Digital Soundtrack

After composing a fistful of short films, several documentaries, and a good few commercials around the world, French composer Alexis Maingaud composed his first feature-length original soundtrack, for Olivier Wright’s debut film PSI in 2017. The following year he was hired by British filmmaker Andrew Desmond to write the music for his 2020 film THE SONATA, featuring Freya Tingley, Simon Abkarian, and Rutger Hauer in a story about a young violinist prodigy in search of her past who inherits a mansion after her long lost father dies under mysterious circumstances. She discovers his last musical masterpiece riddled with cryptic symbols that unravels an evil secret.

Maingaud’s score, recorded in late June 2018 by the National Orchestra of Ile-de-France with the composer conducting—and at the same time inaugurating the orchestra’s brand-new recording studio—is a richly engaging one merging gentle melodies with dramatic and frightening orchestral elements: evocative, haunting violin measures counterpointed by bowing techniques both severe and discomfiting, eerie tonalities and thick, ghostly textures and frightening, dramatic tonalities that built powerful tension and maintain an ongoing, creepy resonance.

The French independent label AOC Production will release the digital soundtrack in mid-May.

For more information on the composer, see here.

Sample the Score on Soundcloud here.

Watch the film’s trailer here: