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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