Elliot Goldenthal’s Oscar-winning score for the multi-award winning movie based on the life of Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo is as vibrant and extraordinarily beautiful as the artist’s autobiographical pictures. Synthesising traditional Mexican music and Goldenthal’s original atmospheric impressions, the film chronicles Kahlo’s volatile relationship with her husband Diego Rivera, her lover Leon Trotsky and her capricious muse against a background of Mexican social upheaval in the first half of the 20th century. The project was obviously a labour of love for its director Julie Taymor and star Salma Hayek, and so too is the score which expresses the agony and the ecstasy of the artist’s tortured soul more eloquently than ever before. Highlights include La Bruja sung by the fiery Hayek and La Llorona, performed in the film by Kahlo’s real life lover, the Costa Rica-born singer Chavela Vargas in a moving scene in which Kahlo is shorn of her beautiful hair. But the entire score bristles with that elusive ‘Wow!’ factor, so if you quiver with anticipation at the thought of listening to Muzsikas or Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, snap this up without delay.