If you've been immersed in the potent Ken Burns film The War on PBS, you will have noticed that a lot of classical music is woven into the soundtrack, along with popular music of the 1940s and our own time. You can get the complete aural side of the film on a four-CD set from Sony or a single collection from the same label that gathers the classical material under the title Songs Without Words. Those who have watched the film are likely to find the experience of hearing the music separately a strongly communicative experience, but you don't need that extra association to enjoy this particular compilation.
The selections here, nearly all of them reflective, if not elegiac, include some remarkably heartful utterances (and some fine performances). The brief Death of Falstaff from William Walton's film score Henry V , with Leonard Slatkin conducting the London Philharmonic, takes on an uncommon poignancy here. And, in this context, the achingly beautiful opening of Aaron Copland's Concerto for Clarinet becomes all the more eloquent.
The jauntier, jazzier part of that concerto (played here by the great Benny Goodman with the composer conducting) provides a welcome contrast. There is some dark, complex, brilliantly constructed music by the late Gyorgy Ligeti, a movement from his Horn Trio (I'm not crazy about the sound the horn player makes, but the eerie piece is quite effective). One of the strange, harmonically unsettled piano works of Franz Liszt, Nuages Gris, is also here, along with the solo clarinet movement from Quartet for the End of Time, Olivier Messiaen's astonishing creation written while a prisoner of war.
The diverse, yet somehow cohesive, collection ends with the ultimate sonic memorial, the Nimrod movement from Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations, spaciously and tellingly shaped by Slatkin with the London Philharmonic. This hymn without words never fails to touch the heart; heard here in the connection to the Burns film, it sounds more moving than ever.
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