Sony Music is proud to announce the release of the original motion picture soundtrack of Cloud Atlas, a major new film directed by Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run) together with Andy and Lana Wachowski (the Matrix trilogy), and based on the best-selling novel by David Mitchell. The soundtrack was composed by Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek und Reinhold Heil in collaboration, reuniting the team that created the highly successful music of The Perfume and Run Lola Run, and recorded with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony conducted by Kristjan Järvi.

Cloud Atlas is a major cinematic event, and the most expensive independent film of all time with a budget of US$ 100 million and a cast including such big names as Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Susan Sarandon, in addition to outstanding actors in Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent. The size of the budget and the large ensemble cast correspond to the multiple strands of the story: Drama, mystery, action and enduring love thread through a single story that unfolds in multiple timelines over the span of 500 years. Characters meet and reunite from one life to the next. Born and reborn. As the consequences of their actions and choices impact one another through the past, the present and the distant future, one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and a single act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.

For the music, which plays an important role in the film, Tykwer linked up again with the Los Angeles-based film and TV composers Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek, an established partnership who scored Tykwer’s previous films, most notably The Perfume, as a team with the director. The music provides much more than atmospheric backing to the movie, in that the recurrence of themes helps to tie together the complex storyline, and above all because the episode set in the 1930s revolves around music. This story casts Ben Whishaw as the young musician Robert Frobisher, who composes the Cloud Atlas Sextet, consisting of six solos nested in the same manner as the linked narratives in the whole scheme of Cloud Atlas. It comes as a moving arrangement for orchestra near the end of the soundtrack.

The 23 tracks of this release, as generous in scale as the novel and movie, are beautifully played by the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony from Leipzig, one of Germany’s finest radio orchestras, under the brilliant direction of Kristjan Järvi, the Estonian-American conductor who has been described by a critic of the New York Times as a reincarnation of Leonard Bernstein. In Tom Tykwer’s notes for the booklet of the international release, the director and composer writes of the superb playing of Järvi’s MDR Symphony Orchestra: “This high-class ensemble was open to our undertaking with great zest for performing and enormous curiosity,” and describes the cooperation as “a fortunate combination to which we owe one of the most fulfilling works of our career.”