Touching the Heart of ‘Philadelphia’

“PHILADELPHIA”

Music From the Motion Picture

Epic Soundtrax

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Terrific new songs by Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young movingly evoke the complex emotions of AIDS-related love and fear on this soundtrack, with a recording of a Giordano aria by the late Maria Callas providing the perfect counterpoint to those subdued bookends.

Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” is in the tradition of his understated gems “The River” and “Wreck on the Highway”--glimpses of people looking for something to hold onto as their life or dreams slip away. “And my clothes don’t fit me no more / Thousand miles just to slip my skin,” he sings, as suspended keyboard notes bleed from one chord into the next.

The same qualities fill Young’s beautiful title song, with the singer-songwriter at his most brittle, angelic and elegiac. Peter Gabriel also explores the movie’s disheartening theme with the sketchy, lightly funky “Love Town.”

If only the producers had commissioned more top-flight artists’ musical impressions of the emotional topic. Instead, we get largely filler, with Sade’s surprisingly earthy version of Percy Mayfield’s “Please Send Me Someone to Love” generating some interest and the Spin Doctors’ butchering of Creedence’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” deserving almost none.

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