Helen Mirren's moving performance as Queen Elizabeth II has drawn much applause, bringing with it the first of no doubt several awards. This soundtrack should follow suit. Composer Alexandre Desplat paints in pastels, suggesting person, time and place with discretion, exemplified by his opening track, “The Queen”. A regal phrase, the score's principal theme, accompanied by timpani, a wash of harp and a run from the harpsichord suggests the trappings of office and an ancestral home in the Celtic countryside. We have game dashing over the moors in “The Hills of Scotland” (tr 2) and a nocturnal miniature of “A Night in Balmoral” where that principal theme is plucked out over those omnipresent timpani (tr 12). Princess Diana is portrayed in a bright motif played on mandolin that brings an Italianate touch of continental warmth and colour to the score: was it inspired by her fondness for the fashions of Versace? When the sunny atmosphere clouds over in this track (“People's Princess”) and the mournful cry of the horn breaks through at 3'24", there's no mistaking the parallel to “The Stag” (tr 6), felled by the hunter, echoing the Princess's own fate in a car chase.

Prime Minister Tony Blair is portrayed in an urgent theme redolent of his quick gait (tr 4), and he and his monarch share a waltz tune together (“Elizabeth and Tony”). “Mourning”, a tender theme for strings, unfurls like a funeral sentence. The CD ends with Lynne Dawson's touching performance of the “Libera me” from Verdi's Requiem, the performance she sang in Westminster Abbey. It's a moving conclusion to a fine score, devoid of cliché, and beautifully played by the LSO. It wins my vote as the soundtrack of 2006.