Mimi and the Mountain Dragon (2019)

In composer Rachel Portman’s 2019 interview for Gramophone about Mimi and the Mountain Dragon, editor Martin Cullingford described how a specific goal of Portman’s score was to “introduce children to classical music and the sounds of the orchestra.” To illustrate this, Portman described how she featured solo instruments “in the same way that Peter and the Wolf does: Mimi’s melody that starts on the solo piano is taken up . . . [and] inverted on all sorts of different instruments.” The little dragon is also stylistically characterized through use of pizzicato and a sound Portman explained as “intentionally quite scrappy to illustrate [the dragon’s] inability to fly.”

From the inception of their collaboration, Portman and writer Sir Michael Morpurgo agreed that they wanted the music to be “integral to the project,” and Portman got to work composing the score before the film was animated. To do this, she relied on the feeling and emotion expressed in Morpurgo’s original story and Owen Sheers’ script adaptation. Portman described how:

“It was very important for me to honor and keep the essence of Michael Murpurgo’s story, but also I find his writing has a wonderful humanity, and a real heart to it. So I never wanted to lose sight of that. I came to the piece imbued with that kind of spirit that he writes in.”

While focused on the story’s spirit, it was also important to Portman that her music for would communicate to children (much like her opera The Little Prince), that she featured a young girl’s voice (the soloist for Mimi), and that the music sends a message about the unifying power of song:

“When people come together and sing, there’s something very forgiving . . . in a way it remedies the broken community in this story . . . particularly the words Owen [Sheers] wrote about not needing to be frightened anymore about what we don’t know and what we can’t see, and fear of the other. And it’s a good metaphor, I think, for the world we live in: to have acceptance of “other,” and acceptance of “foreignness.”

Portman’s full interview for Gramophone is available here.