First collaborating with director Mike Leigh on 1999's 'Topsy-Turvy,' creative composer Gary Yershon's long career composing music for drama encompasses score for the leading UK theater companies, West End and Broadway productions, radio, TV and film. Impressive, to say the least, but his work here on 'Mr. Turner' is a cut, a step, one major brush stroke of depth of wealth than he's ever produced before, in my humble opinion.

'Mr. Turner' explores the last quarter century of the great if eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Profoundly affected by the death of his father, loved by a housekeeper he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies.

Throughout this, he travels, paints, stays with the country aristocracy, visits brothels, is a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, has himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he can paint a snowstorm, and is both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty.

Indeed, the Yershon and Leigh collaboration continues with the short, 'A Running Jump,' whose score is also included on this release. Coming together, if listened to back-to-back, as one complementary, highly-contrasting and yet smoothly transitional works of music, both showcase Gary Yershon as a man at the top of his game.

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