Hillbilly and bluegrass sounds underscore T-Bone Burnett's soundtrack to the award-winning Coenbrothers film. Burnett researched into the type of music that was popular in 1937 to give added musical element to the movie. Among the musical legends T Bone called on to be part of the soundtrack are Ralph Stanley, Gillian Welch, John Hartford, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, the Fairfield Four, and Norman Blake. There are 19 tracks on this soundtrack.

Roman Polanski's telling of famed Polish composer-pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival in the Nazi-controlled Warsaw ghetto can't help but be infused with the director's deepest passions: he himself escaped the Krakw ghetto as a boy of 7. The musician's status as a musical hero to the oppressed Polish Jews of World War II was surpassed only by that of Chopin, the composer who was at the core of Szpilman's repertoire. Thus this score revolves tightly around Chopin's music, with modern Polish pianist Janusz Olejniczak paying passionate homage to both his musical and national forebears, the haunting strains of the Nocturne in C-sharp Minor setting the film's historical and dramatic tone. The underscore of previous Polanski collaborator Wojciech Kilar (The Ninth Gate, Death and the Maiden) is represented here by the soulful "Moving to the Ghetto," a cue that helps anchor the soundtrack's troubling time and place with understated grace. The collection concludes with a rare, remastered performance of Chopin's Mazurka Op. 17, No.4 by Szpilman himself, recorded in Warsaw in 1948. --Jerry McCulley