VARIOUS - 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY SOUNDTRACK. NM/NM

Various Artists' 2001: A Space Odyssey (Music From The Motion Picture Sound Track) captures one of cinema's most unusual musical decisions: for Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, a newly commissioned score by Alex North was set aside in favour of existing classical recordings, making music central to the film's almost nonverbal sense of scale and mystery. That choice helped give several classical works a renewed popular life, and the soundtrack itself became a hit, reaching No. 24 on the Billboard 200.

Rather than behaving like a conventional orchestral score, this album works as a sequence of instantly recognisable set-pieces. Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra brings its famous surge of grandeur, Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube supplies the film's eerie elegance, and György Ligeti's choral and orchestral pieces introduce the unsettling, modern edge that makes Kubrick's vision feel so uncanny even now. Aram Khachaturian's Gayane Ballet Suite (Adagio) adds another note of isolation and melancholy.