After you watch Australian director Gillian Armstrong’s gorgeous period film Death Defying Acts, which surrounds an unlikely love story set in Scotland among a phony psychic con artist (Oscar winner Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Harry Houdini (Memento’s Guy Pearce), you’re left wanting to learn more about the legendary “escapologist.”  However, after you listen to the film’s score, you become fascinated by an altogether different magician — not Houdini, but the imaginative composer Cezary Skubiszewski instead.   

Born and raised in Warsaw “in the midst of an arts and theatre focused family,” consisting of his pianist mother, prima ballerina aunt, and theatre manager father, Skubiszeweski still recalls the moment that the sound of the blues “blew his mind” at age twelve.  Yet “it would take another 20 years, and the death of his father, before Skubiszewski was true to his own desire to make music.”  After leaving Poland for his adopted homeland of Australia and studying veterinary medicine in Melbourne, he journeyed to the outback in New South Wales, packing a precious few items including a piano which he practiced all the time while living in an army tent.

Working only one day a week to support himself and slowly gaining the self-belief he said one must have “to be a creative person,” Skubiszewski notes that it was about that time that he became much more serious about dedicating himself to music. While he credits inspiration in a wide range of sources from Miles Davis to American Beauty composer Thomas Newman to Radiohead (“because they always try to challenge themselves,”),  Skubiszewski takes a similar approach in his own work, saying that he still believes he’s on “a journey to discover more about myself, about what I can come up with.”  To this end, he should be extremely pleased with one of the most breathtaking and creative scores of 2008 with the Lakeshore Records release of Death Defying Acts. 

As someone who notes that he loves “very talented people” and “despise[s] mediocrity,” it’s only fitting that director Armstrong (Little Women, Oscar and Lucinda, Charlotte Gray) would seek out a talented perfectionist to tackle a score about one of history’s most talented perfectionists.  Boldly opening with an old-fashioned “Death Defying Suite,” which introduces every major theme that will work its way throughout the entire score, including those for the lead characters and diverse settings, Skubiszewski begins the album as though it was recorded in the era of Hollywood’s Golden Age where MGM musicals began with extended musical overtures and credit sequences to showcase the compositions.  Running nearly eight minutes and changing from a playful folk styled opening to melancholy, romantic, and Celtic throughout, the album continues on, later picking up on the threads he’d introduced in the opener with the tracks named for two of the characters in the film.