The score for Forza G is essentially based around two main themes. The first, called “Forza G – Per Gioco-Presentazione Della Pattuglia,” is a playful and mischievous march for pizzicato strings and processed keyboards, and tinkling harpsichords, which captures the playboy image and carefree attitude of the protagonist. Subsequent performances in “La Festa,” “L’Aliante,” and “Burlsceo,” are similarly jovial, and then in “Quella Donna” Edda dell’Orso comes back with her orgasm noises from L’Uccello Dalle Piume di Cristallo, alongside some groovy guitars and jazz orchestrations. Later, “Prova d’Acrobazia” features theme being whistled, while “Le Frecce Tricolori” is a straightforward reprise of the opening cue.

The second, called “Sospesi Fra Le Nuvole” – ‘Suspended in the Clouds,’ is a little more wistful and dreamily romantic, a combination of lovely lilting strings, warm and inviting woodwinds, with a contemporary light rock percussion backing. As the theme develops it gains some soft voices intoning wordlessly, and becomes a lovely, intimate pseudo-lounge piece that expresses the effortless love of soaring through the clouds. The theme reappears in four subsequent cues (“Ripresa Prima,” “Ripresa Seconda,” and so on), all of which are really lovely.

When these two themes are not present there are a couple of standout standalone pieces; “Come Un Western” features the unusual circumstance whereby Morricone is pasticheing his own theme from A Fistful of Dollars, “Psichedelico Jazzistico” sounds exactly like you think it does. Interestingly, considering that the film features several spectacular scenes of aerobatics, there is nothing in the score that could be described as heroic or sweeping or in any redolent of the exhilaration of flight; a shame, as I was eager to hear Morricone go down that road.

Focus on: Pizzicato Strings, Processed Keyboards, Harpsichord, Guitar, Jazz Orchestral Instruments, Woodwinds, Modern Light Rock Percussion, (pseudo-lounge piece

per gioco-presentazione della pattuglia (04:07)

Sospesi Fra Le Nuvole (First Reprise) (02:44)

come un western (02:35)

Morricone’s score for Giù La Testa is probably the least well-known score he wrote for a Leone movie, but is still steeped in the beauty, creativity, and occasional deep weirdness that he always brought to films like this. It’s anchored by a main theme, obviously called “Giù La Testa,” which features earnest strings underneath a playful, almost lounge-like melody, Alessandro Alessandrini whistling, Edda dell’Orso’s haunting wordless soprano, and a peculiar touch wherein a vocalist sings the name ‘Sean’ over and over again – this being an important plot point in the film related to Mallory. “Scherzi a Parte” reprises the main theme for a plethora of different instrumental textures, each more cheerful and carefree than the last, while the 9-minute “Invenzione Per John” offers extended takes on all the core ideas, including more vocal performances of ‘Sean Sean Sean’.

“Marcia degli Accattoni” is a sequence which somehow incorporates the croaking vocals from Quando le Donne Avevano la Coda, a statement of Mozart’s "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”（Music see here）‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,’ and all manner of unusual instrumental touches into a quirky march theme; as odd as it is, it actually becomes quite insistent and serious as it develops, and turns into a terrifically effective piece of action and suspense. Later, the underlying melody of this theme receives an emotional oboe arrangement in the brief “Addio Messico”,

Other cues of note include “Mesa Verde,” a haunting piece for evocative woodwinds and strings; the warmly nostalgic “Messico e Irlanda”, which features some lovely writing for strings and guitar; and the tensely dissonant suspense of “Rivoluzione Contro,” a Morricone hallmark. The final vocal version of the main theme is a perfect coda.

When you compare this with the likes of A Fistful of Dollars or The Good the Bad and the Ugly it pales in comparison – let’s face it, anything would – but there is a great deal to admire about Giù La Testa. The laid-back attitude of the main theme is a little deceptive, because there is actually a lot going on, in the way it captures the devil-may-care attitude of the main character, but also surreptitiously reveals his motivations. The idiosyncratic orchestrations and offbeat rhytms are pure Morricone, and the whole thing will appeal to anyone who is drawn to his spaghetti western style. The score has been released numerous times over the years; this version of the album is the one released by Cinevox in the year 2000 and runs for a touch under an hour, but there are several others which features more score, various bonus tracks, all of which are worthy of exploration.

Focus on: Mozart's“Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”（Music see here）, Strings, Whistles by Alessandro Alessandrini, Wordless Soprano by Edda dell'Orso, Woodwinds, Strings, Guitar

Giu' La Testa (04:16)

Invenzione Per John (09:05)

Marcia Degli Accattoni (05:54)

Addio Messico (00:53)

Mesa Verde (01:40) (Editor's note: Morricone said: "...I wrote a main theme that I personally liked very much, but no one remembered it. The title was Mesa Verde" See "Lontano Dai Sogni" Chinese version P101)

Morricone’s score is another one of his Gruppo d’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza scores, abstract and dissonant, a collision of psychotic wailing jazz textures, musique concrète, and long sequences of instrumental impressionism that test the patience. The opening cue, “Seguita,” is a vivid explosion of free jazz featuring especially frenetic passages featuring electric guitars, stand up bass, and soprano saxophones, as well as electronic manipulations and yowling voices that sound like cats in heat. I’m serious. The title cue, “Gli Occhi Freddi Delia Paura,” is an extended exercise in scraping things against each other, bizarre metallic sound effects and seemingly random outbursts of noise that certainly unsettle the listener, but force the listener to examine the limits of their endurance.

And so the score goes… virtually the entire rest of the score is based on these ideas, with very little of anything that could be described as thematic consonance. There isn’t a single cue where Morricone breaks out into anything resembling a melody. People who really dig Morricone’s super-experimental super-avant garde scores, as well as people who appreciate atonal free jazz, may find Gli Occhi Freddi Delia Paura to their liking; I’m glad I’ve heard it, but once is enough for me.

Focus on: Jazz that combines psychotic wails, free jazz, electric guitar, upright bass, soprano, saxophone, and strange metal sound effects

Seguita (03:18)

Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura (03:32)

Morricone scored several of these left-wing pro-union dramas, and many of them feel similar. La Classe Operaia Va In Paradiso may be the best of them, combining a full orchestra with the I Cantori Moderni Di Alessandroni choir and the usual array of offbeat sound design for which he was so famous. The main title, “La Classe Operaia Va In Paradiso,” is an unusual staccato march that incorporates bizarre sound effects – duck quacks, highly processed gunfire that often morphs into a fluttering effect – against a vaguely comedic trumpet line and rapped snares, that becomes robust and rhythmic as it progresses; the repetitive nature of the theme is clearly commenting on Lulù’s place as a cog in a highly mechanized industrial machine, while the highly classical violin phrases that come in from time to time offer a lyrical counterpoint to the idea, romanticizing the freedom from the capitalist system for which the unionists fight.

Many of these ideas are expanded upon in the 8-minute “Sinfonia dell’Ottimista,” which is if anything even more abstract and challenging than the main title with it’s extended periods of texture and dissonance, although Morricone does return to the main theme regularly. “Metamorfosi,” “Tempi di Lavorazione” amd “Alienazione” are similarly bizarre, repeating the main title rhythms against an aggressive, brutal-sounding electric guitar throb and more unsettling orchestral textures that move in and out of the piece. “Il Sogno” is a challenging piece that mostly pairs stark woodwind effects with the fluttering gunfire idea, but then morphs into a disquieting textural piece for piano, low strings, and low brass. Really, only “Pazzia da Lavoro” offers any real diversity from this core sound, initially juxtaposing a dance-like mandolin motif against threatening brass chords, before eventually offering a large scale statement of the rhythmic part of the main title theme for percussion, piano, and sly strings.

La Classe Operaia Va In Paradiso is a tough score to love, although Morricone clearly did as it features regularly in his concert repertoire, confounding those who only turned up to hear The Mission and Cinema Paradiso. However, if this sort of aggressive Morricone experimentalism has always been fascinating to you, the score has been released numerous times over the years; the version I’m writing about here is the 2009 limited edition from the Italian label GDM, which takes the original 8-track LP album presentation and expands it to more than an hour, with several variations on the core material.

Focus on: Comedy trumpet line, rap snare drum, highly classical violin licks, electric guitar throb, orchestral textures, woodwinds, fluttering gunshots, piano, bass strings, bass brass, mandolin, piano, strings

La classe operaia va in paradiso (05:20)

Pazzia da lavoro (02:23)

Despite the comedic elements in the film, large parts of the score for Tre Nel Mille is surprisingly lovely. The main theme, “Ballata Trovatorica,” is a soft ballad for strings and guitar that is lonely, perhaps even a little sad, capturing the generally solitary existence the three central characters lead as they travel from town to town on behalf of the Roman army. Cues like “Elegia Con Interruzione” builds more on these ideas, as does the pretty “Le Voci dal Liuto,” which blends a light lute melody with low, slightly menacing woodwinds and cooed vocals.

Perhaps more indicative of their characters is the infectious “Saltrello Dei Tre Pupazzi,” a medieval-sounding dance for lutes and percussion that just stays the right side of playfully catchy, but cues like these are the exception rather than the rule. “La Vallata di Firenze” is an unusual piece for oddly-metered rhythmic ideas, competing male and female wordless vocals, and a cacophony of period instruments. “Responsori Per Liuto e Voci,” “La Piccola Zampogna,” and “La Grande Zampogna” are similarly challenging and unsettlingly dissonant, with latter using woodwinds in a very unusual timbre. Most unusual of all is “Maiali Ed Altri Animali,” a bizarre cacophony of human croaks, oinks, whistles, and other assorted animal sounds that have to be heard to be believed.

Tre Nel Mille is another one of those Morricone scores which blends the endlessly lovely with the utterly insane, as only Morricone could. Most people will find the main theme appealing, but some of it may be way too out in left field to be tolerable. The only full release of the score came out in 2010 on the Italian Cometa label, and this is it

Focus on: Strings, Guitar Ballads, Medieval Lute, Woodwinds, Vocals, Whistles

Ballata Travaticorica (01:37)

Elegia Con Interruzione (01:56)

La Vallata Di Firenze (04:09)

Maiali Ed Altri Animali(01:33)

108-9804 THE LEGEND OF 1900

Let me first of all say that Morricone’s main theme, as heard in the 8-minute title track ‘The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean’, is completely stunning. Beginning with a somewhat ungainly piano and saxophone duet, the theme gradually builds in both volume and size until, at precisely 3:52, the string section swells magnificently into the first major performance of what surely is one of the most beautiful themes Morricone has ever written. Where the theme is present again, in tracks such as ‘Child’ and ‘Ships and Snow’, the score is undoubtedly lifted to a higher plateau.

There are also some lovely individual tracks with prominent instrumental and performance solos, especially as the soft and eloquent saxophone-led opening ‘Playing Love’, the beautiful flute solo in the aforementioned ‘Child’ (which, at times, reminds me of Two Mules for Sister Sara), the quietly moving ‘The Goodbye Between Nineteen Hundred and Max’, and the quasi-classical pianoforte pieces ‘Study For Three Hands’, ‘Tarantella in 3rd Class’, ‘Enduring Movement’ and ‘A Mozart Reincarnated’.

The rest of the album, however, I found the score to be rather less endearing, mainly because of Morricone’s distinctive, but stubbornly unconventional orchestrations, and the rather irritating habit he has of combining two completely different styles of music into one cue. Rather than being complementary, as was presumably the intention, the opposing jazz and classical influences in tracks such as ‘Trailer’, ‘Goodbye Duet’ and the two ‘Nineteen Hundred’s Madness’ cues clash terribly, and result in a listening experience similar to one you might have while playing two pieces of music at once. Individually, the elements are lovely, especially the traditional orchestral parts, but Morricone completely ruins their overall impact through the ill-timed introduction of Gianni Oddi’s jazz saxophone, or Gilda Buttà’s ragtime piano.

In addition, some of Morricone’s cues seem to be deliberately structured to seem unfinished and, dare I say it, amateurish, as though performed by a fledgling pianist. As an example, listen to the melodies in ‘The Crisis’ and ‘Second Crisis’ – they constantly end on the wrong key, and never seem to come to a natural conclusion, instead just drifting away into nothingness. This kind of writing is frustrating in the extreme, and although it probably makes sense on-screen, does nothing to enhance the enjoyment of the album. By the end of the CD, when Roger Waters’ song “Lost Boys Calling” began, I had more than had enough. I don’t know what Roger Waters has been doing since he was part of Pink Floyd, and after his Rolf Harris-style warbling performance here, I don’t think I want to either.

Focus on: Rolf Harris， piano, saxophone, strings, flute solo, quasi-classical piano music, jazz, classical music, Gianni Audi’s jazz saxophone, Gilda Buta’s ragtime piano

1900's theme

The Legend of the Pianist

Playing Love

tarantellain in 3rd class

trailer

Lost Boys Calling (written by Ennio Morricone and Roger Waters, performed by Roger Waters) 迷失男孩的呼唤

Mission To Mars has been one of the most critically despised movies of the year – a plotless, senseless would-be space epic that, according to the majority of the reviewers, took a great idea about the first, faltering steps of interplanetary travel and ruined it with bad acting, a terrible screenplay, and hopeless direction by the former wunderkind Brian De Palma. In fact, the only elements of the film to receive generally positive notice have been the special effects and Ennio Morricone’s elegiac score. And while I find myself disagreeing with the movie’s bad press, I couldn’t agree more with the appraisal of Ennio’s efforts. As film music, Mission To Mars is a blockbuster in every respect.

The film’s plot is a simple one: four astronauts are sent on a mission to become the first people to walk on the surface of the red planet. Led by Don Cheadle, the intrepid explorers set out into deepest space and, surprisingly, they reach Mars without a single glitch. While exploring a mountain range near the base camp, the crew are suddenly attacked by a huge tornado which appears out of the top of the highest peak, and communications with Earth are severed. A rescue mission is quickly arranged, and the four man crew (captain Tim Robbins, his wife Connie Nielsen, co-pilot Gary Sinise and engineer Jerry O’Connell) are dispatched to find out what happened and rescue any survivors. What transpires is not the heroic, gung-ho space adventure that many expected, but a lyrical, beautiful, thoughtful rumination on life, space, and the origins of humanity.

While undoubtedly an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, both visually and conceptually, Mission To Mars takes things one step further by providing answers to all the questions Kubrick asked back in 1968 – and this is the film’s only let-down. The film’s finale completely undermines what has transpired in the previous hour and a half, making what was once a thought-provoking “what if” scenario into a far too literal explanation of Mars’s secrets which leaves nothing to the imagination. The brilliance of films like 2001, and the recent Contact, is that the film leaves the viewer to make up their own mind as to the reality of what they have just seen. Mission To Mars compels the audience to accept everything they are presented with as truth, thereby shattering the film’s hard-earned realism. A degree of ambiguity would have helped retain the delicious mystery and romanticism of Mars, and would have made the film a far more satisfying experience.

But as a cinematic spectacle, Hollywood will need to go some to top the expansive vistas of Mars, the incredible beauty of space, and the almost balletic way life in orbit is depicted by De Palma’s camera. Aurally too, Mission to Mars is a complete triumph, with Ennio Morricone’s score leading the way. For the most part, Morricone eschews the traditional “spacey” sounds that clutter many of today’s science fiction films, instead composing from the heart. The romance of discovery, the beauty of space, the emotional connections that exist between the protagonists, the heroic sacrifices that are made for the good of others, the awe and wonder experienced when setting foot on a new planet. These are the things that Morricone’s music illustrates, and illustrates beautifully.

The first five cues on the album are introspective, quiet and peaceful in tone, lacking the orchestral pomp and bombast that one might usually associate with a journey into the far reaches of the galaxy. The opening track, ‘A Heart Beats In Space’, begins as nothing more than a series of ascending string scales accompanied by gentle electric guitar ambiences, an undulating flute line, a trumpet soloist, and a choir full of soothing female voices, before slowly moving into the first performance of the score’s main theme. ‘A Martian’ and ‘A World Which Searches’ all reprise the main thematic content, the former predominantly on a synthesiser, complemented by voices, and which swell intermittently to emotionally-heightened orchestral crescendos in a manner which is sometimes not too dissimilar to the warm-sounding space epics penned by John Williams.‘And Afterwards’ briefly dabbles in some angular, abstract shifting electronic tones that briefly resurrect memories of ‘The Conversation’ from Close Encounters, before returning into lyrical mode for the beautifully tragic ‘A Wife Lost’, with its Titanic-style synthesised voices.

The mood changes for good with the controversial church organ cue, ‘Towards The Unknown’, which is less successful on CD than it is in the film, but still manages to generate a great deal of unease in the listener. Stark organ tones, repeated in clusters, and an anxious electronic pulse increase in urgency and volume as the track progresses through the gradual inclusion of heavy bass drones and harsh, isolated string chords. The piece underscores a desperate scene in which the rescue crew vainly search for the tiny holes in the hull of their ship, damaged in a mini-meteorite storm, and which is draining the precious oxygen from the atmosphere. Although certainly an unconventional choice of orchestration, the organ does not sound as out of place as one might expect, and it at least shows that Morricone is willing to try new and unique ways of film scoring, no matter what the circumstances.

However, it is the final four cues which are the undoubted standouts of the album, beginning with the 13-minute ‘Sacrifice of Hero’, which accompanies the fateful spacewalk as the four rescuers are forced to abandon their craft high above Mars’s surface. What begins as an exercise in tension gradually develops into a terribly moving lament for the human spirit. A new arrangement of the main theme, which is actually not too dissimilar from the one he wrote for the Golden Globe-winning Legend of 1900, emerges, accompanied by a bold and bright horn countermelody and a heartbreaking movement for woodwinds and strings, while a bed of snare drums keep time underneath, continually drawing militaristic parallels with the romantic image of glorious death in battle. When the full might of the choir joins the fray during the rousing, patriotic ‘Where?’, you know you are hearing the work of a complete and utter genius. The score concludes with ‘All The Friends’, a pastoral coda with a Mission-esque oboe statement.

I cannot recommend this score highly enough. Fans of Morricone’s lyrical work will find themselves in raptures at the glorious nature of the Italian maestro’s themes, while admirers of his innovative and challenging scoring techniques will nod in appreciation of his bold choices of orchestration. Although the score is likely to be tarred with the same brush as the film, it would be unwise to simply lump the music in with all the other stodgy sci-fi scores that are written for stodgy sci-fi pictures. With a little more care, and with a better ending, Mission To Mars could have been a space odyssey for the generation, and despite the shortcomings of the film itself, Morricone’s music genuinely deserves a higer level of recognition.

Focus on: John Williams，strings, electric guitar, flute, trumpet, female choir, synthesizer, vocals, orchestral music, Titanic style, organ, French horn, woodwinds, snare drum, oboe

A heart beats in space

Towards the unknown

Sacrifice of a hero

110-0004 MALÉNA

Ennio Morricone’s fifth and final score of 2000 is for the Italian romantic-comedy-drama Maléna, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, for whom Morricone has written several classic scores, not least the incredible Cinema Paradiso. What’s interesting about Maléna is the fact that, unlike 99% of Morricone’s output of late, it has been the recipient of quite a bit of publicity, mainly through its association with the Miramax marketing machine. A second Golden Globe Best Score nomination in a row has been secured for the Italian maestro – following his success with The Legend of 1900 last year – and is backed up by a high profile soundtrack release. The only difference between this and 1900, though, is that Maléna is worthy of the praise.

To quote from the Miramax press kit, Maléna is a film about a beautiful young widow who inspires a young boy’s independence and courage amongst the chaos and intolerance of war. The film stars Monica Bellucci (recently seen in Under Suspicion) as Maléna Scordia, the most ravishing woman in a sleepy Sicilian village, whose husband is away fighting in World War II. Attracting lustful glances from the men of the town, being the recipient of scornful gossip from their jealous wives, and followed wherever she goes by children on bicycles, Maléna thinks her life could not get any more difficult – until news reaches her that her husband has been killed in action. But solace comes from an unexpected place: one of the children who follow her, young Renato Amoroso (Giuseppe Sulfaro), decides to help Maléna through her suffering, and becomes her “secret shadow”, ensuring that the classical beauty is able to come to terms with her loss, and with the narrow-mindedness of her neighbors.

Despite his recognized talent as a composer in the romantic and dramatic genres, eccentric comedy music has also always been one of Morricone’s fortes – as the music in cues such as ‘Hypocritical’, ‘Walks in the Town’, ‘People’s Whispers’ and the highly rhythmic ‘Orgy’ suggest. The tenderness of an acoustic guitar and the warmth of the string section vie for attention with a surprisingly jovial brass section in oompah-band time, and a series of oddly-metered descending phrases that bounce around the woodwinds and swirl away into nothingness. These cues are obviously intended to depict Maléna’s life in her Italian village, as she goes about her business while being stared at, whispered about, and pursued by hordes of kids. The irony and downright peculiarity of Maléna’s plight is perfectly summed up by Morricone’s off-kilter comedic sensibilities.

The music that will remain in the heart longest, though, are the ones that concern pure, unadulterated romance – cues such as ‘Maléna’ and the especially the extended ‘End Titles’ simply ooze grace and charm and beauty, in a manner not dissimilar to the sounds heard in, and the aforementioned Cinema Paradiso – there’s a longing, unrequited quality in the solo viola and solo flute performances that breaks the heart. The solo viola is also present in other cues, notably ‘In the House’, adding a depth and resonance to the music, while ‘Sex Thoughts’ features an attractive, moody trumpet and saxophone duet playing a sultry variation on the comedic theme.

In addition to these, two other cues stand out from the others for their total uniqueness: ‘Lynching’ is one of Morricone’s rare pure action cues, a dangerous-sounding, throbbing sequence of moody percussion ostinatos and surprisingly violent orchestral dissonance that is quite unlike anything I have heard from Morricone, at least in any of his mainstream works. At completely the other end of the musical spectrum is ‘Movie of Other Times’, Morricone’s personal affectionate homage to the Golden Age of film scoring, where he intentionally apes the composing styles of Max Steiner, Alfred Newman and others in a cue which seeks to illustrate little Renato’s love of the cinema.

In a year in which Morricone has written scores as brilliant and diverse as Mission to Mars, Vatel, Canone Inverso and Maléna, surely the time has come for him to be acknowledged by his peers on an international level. Despite having two Golden Globe wins (and further a nomination for this score), some sort of recognition from the Academy Awards is surely long overdue. Maléna could well be the score to buck the trend – especially with the Miramax marketing machine at its back. Whatever the case, Maléna is a special score, and is indicative of the great things European film music has to offer.

Note: The CD being reviewed here is a special Oscar promo of the score, produced for the American premiere of the film, and which was distributed to those who attended. A “proper” release, on the Virgin label, and with two extra tracks, is being released on February 4th 2001.

Focus on: Max Steiner、Alfred Newman ，acoustic guitar, strings, woodwinds, viola, flute, viola, trumpet, saxophone, percussion, violent orchestral dissonance,

Malena (02:37)

Inchini Ipocriti E Disperazione (02:04)

Passeggiata In Paese (03:17)

Bisbigli Della Gente (02:42)

Nella Casa... (02:16)

Linciaggio (02:46)

With a budget of over $12m, Fateless is one of the most expensive and ambitious Hungarian films ever made. Director Koltai is most famous in Hollywood as a cinematographer, having worked with directors such as István Szabó and Giuseppe Tornatore in a 30-year career. Fateless is his directorial debut. Unsurprisingly, given the prestigious nature of the project, Koltai turned to one of Europe’s most revered and respected composers to write the score: Ennio Morricone, writing his seventh score of 2005. Considering his advancing years (he turned 78 last November), the fact that Morricone continues to be prolific is nothing short of astounding. It’s also astounding that, despite having written over 500 scores in a 45-year career, he is not resting on his laurels or simply coasting towards retirement. Fateless was nominated for a European Film Award in 2005, as has been the recipient of a great deal of well-deserved praise from the film music world for his work.

It’s become accepted within the cinematic world that movies which deal with events on the monumental scale of the Holocaust are underscored with beauty: the juxtaposition of shocking visual imagery of mass human suffering with music of immense grace and lyricism somehow makes the tragedy more tragic, the horror more horrific, and the emotional impact more deeply felt. Over the years, composers from John Williams to Georges Delerue have understood this connection between beauty and misery, and Ennio Morricone for once does not buck the trend. His musical depiction of life in a concentration camp focuses on the hope that prevails in these places, on the way in which humanity finds a way to shield itself from the depravity of the world around them, and how, even in the darkest moments, brightness somehow prevails.

Anyone familiar with Morricone’s canon will know what to expect when I say that Fateless is a classic example of his melodic style: there are echoes of Once Upon a Time in America, The Mission, and his rejected score for What Dreams May Come when listening to Fateless’s main theme, which bookends the album. One of the most remarkable cues is “Return to Life”, which begins with a pipe organ, switches to an oboe solo, segues into a full choir, and ends with a superb Lisa Gerrard vocal, all backed by a sweeping string section. One of it’s recapitulations, in “About Solitude”, is subtly beautiful.

Yes, I said Lisa Gerrard. One of the most interesting things about Fateless is Morricone’s decision to have Gerrard take on the role which Edda dell’Orso has so wonderfully fulfilled in previous scores – the provision of wordless vocals. Gerrard contributes her lush, immediately-recognisable voice to a number of tracks, including the soaring “A Song” and the almost ecclesiastical “A Voice from the Inside”. Those familiar with her work via her collaborations with Hans Zimmer, or her solo scores, may be surprised at the range, depth of emotion, and classical style her voice brings to this score. Her performances are definite highlights.

The rest of the score continues in a similar vein: respectful, solemn, but wholly beautiful reflections in the nature of war, life, death, and redemption. Other cues are notable for some of their instrumental choices: the breathy pan flute which first appeared briefly at the end of “Return to Life” reappears during “The Beginning of the Tragedy”, and “To Return and Remember”, which also features an unexpectedly jaunty performance of that most Hungarian of instruments, the cimbalom. “The Field” is a more dramatic, urgent piece with an increased level of brass; “Home Again” is a soft, pastoral, wistful duet for piano and oboe, again backed by strings; “Psychological Destruction” is a clever menacing combination of snare drums and tremolo strings, with a brass performance of the main theme just peeking through the gloom.

It really is no wonder that Ennio Morricone is so revered amongst his contemporaries, and continues to be cited as an inspiration for composers across the world. His career has nothing been short of groundbreaking, and his gift for melody, orchestration and emotion is at times quite astonishing. Fateless reminds us of why he is held in such high esteem, but equally reminds us of what Hollywood is missing out on by continually failing to give him quality projects to score, or by constraining his uniqueness into the confines of demographics. I daresay Morricone is happier working in Europe, and shows no sign of slowing down, despite his advancing years. Fateless is one of the scores of the year in anyone’s estimation, and an early contender for the top honours of 2006.

Focus on: John Williams，Georges Delerue, Lisa Gerrard, Hans Zimmer, cimbalom，Organ, oboe, voice, strings, breath panpipe, snare drum, vibrato strings, brass, piano, oboe, snare drum, vibrato strings

sorstalansag-1

visszateres az eetbe

Egy belso hang

a tabo

meg mindig otthon

Writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s sixth film, Inglourious Basterds is a World War II movie with attitude. Set in mainland Europe at the height of the conflict, it stars Brad Pitt as Aldo Raine, the leader of a crack platoon of Jewish-American soldiers who have dubbed themselves ‘the Basterds’, and who actively seek out and savagely kill as many German servicemen as possible, with the intent of creating fear and discord amongst the troops. His opposing number is Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a cruel and ruthless SS officer also known as ‘The Jew Hunter’, whose actions in murdering the family of a young Franco-Jewish family comes back to haunt him when the only survivor, a young girl named Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), embarks on a plot to assassinate Hitler at the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film.

Unusually for Tarantino, he actively sought out composer Ennio Morricone to score his film, but was unable to secure his services due to a scheduling conflict with his score for the Giuseppe Tornatore film Baarìa; instead, he did what he always does: score the film with a lavish temp-track from cult European and blaxploitation movies from the 60s and 70s. It’s difficult to judge the soundtrack in a conventional way, as this is not a conventional soundtrack, but anyone who enjoys the work of the composers featured here, or of Tarantino’s mix-and-match soundtracks, are still likely to find plenty to enjoy.

Ennio Morricone’s four cuts, which come from the films The Big Gundown, Revolver and Allonsanfàn, give you an idea of the kind of score Morricone would have written had he been hired to write the entire thing; a lot of it is the nervous, spaghetti-western inspired music with the twangy guitars, stark woodwind writing, and the unconventional choral and vocal performances that characterized his output throughout much of the 1960s. The “Surrender” cue has a quite epic and expansive scope, and “Un Amico” has a romantic Euro-pop sweep, while “Rabbia e Tarantella” slowly builds from a staccato piano motif into a glorious, expansive orchestral march of great flair, energy and memorability. Curiously, “The Verdict” from The Big Gundown features an undisguised excerpt from Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A Minor (“Für Elise”) that is quite eerie in this context.

Charles Bernstein’s “White Lightning”, a cool western groove with more twangy guitars and hollow-sounding vocal scats, also featured on the Kill Bill soundtrack and is clearly a Tarantino favorite. Gianni Ferrio’s “One Silver Dollar” is also in the Morricone western mode, albeit with a prominent harmonica solo that gives it an unexpectedly appropriate French lilt. Jacques Loussier’s main theme from Dark of the Sun employs unusual meters and rhythmic devices to create an unsettling mood, while Lalo Schifrin’s “Tiger Tank” from Kelly’s Heroes has a dominant sense of brutal, brass-led bluster. There are also several songs, from Billy Preston’s funkadelic vocals on “Slaughter”, to David Bowie’s psychedelic “Cat People”, and even a couple of German-language salon songs recorded in the period and performed by Zarah Leander, Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch.

It’s all very unconventional, anachronistic and self-referential, but it’s the way Tarantino thinks, both as a director and as a creator of the musical tone of this films; as a conventional soundtrack, and despite the presence of excellent music from the likes of Morricone and Schifrin, it’s likely too bizarre for score fans to appreciate, but as a glimpse into the mind of Tarantino it’ quite fascinating.

Focus on: Western Music, Guitar, Woodwinds, Chorus, Vocals, Beethoven

2:46      The Surrender （La resa） / From La resa dei conti （FA6702） 04:10

2:39      Un amico /   From Revolver （FA7309） 04:47

3:53      Rabbia e tarantella /   From Allonsanfàn （FA7401） 03:57

3:04      Mystic and Severe /   From Da uomo a uomo （FA6703） 03:12

Despite being 81 years old, Morricone’s talent shows no sign of waning. The 10-minute “Sinfonia per Baarìa” is a quintessential Morricone piece, romantically sweeping with prominent strings, dancing woodwinds, and the familiar lyrical chords, but interspersed with the moments of dissonance that make his music so unique and compelling. New additions to the canon in this score’s case are the lamenting male vocalist intoning over the music in what I assume to be the Sicilian dialect, and the subsequent ethnic woodwind writing which gives the theme a distinct North African flavor. Unfortunately, the later half of the cue is rather oddly obscured by various dialogue clips and sound effects, including trains, chickens and waves lapping, which does spoil the mood somewhat, but thankfully all the main material is re-stated in the meat of the underscore itself.

There is some truly soaring music to be heard in this score; cues such as “Baarìa”, “Brindisi” and “Racconto di Una Vita” are heart-meltingly gorgeous, and showcase Morricone’s unashamedly emotional thematic writing at its very best. The music becomes wistful, almost idyllic, during “Il Corpo e la Terra” and “Un Gioco Sereno”, both of which make use of sunny, lilting guitars and playful woodwinds. Other cues are more strident; the superb “Ribellione”, “La Visita” and “Un Fiscaletto” feature another one of the wonderfully pompous marches that Morricone has written so well over the years, while “Lo Zoppo” is a punchy action cue filled with slashing, propulsive string writing, off-kilter rhythms and howling trumpets.

It’s all really quite excellent, and highly recommended for those who have appreciated Morricone’s work over the years. Quite how much longer Morricone can go on is unknown; according to the Internet Movie Database, Baarìa is the 492nd project in a long and illustrious career that stretches back to 1959, and if he were to stop now he would have left one of the most indelible marks on the cinema of any composer in history. But, if after almost 500 scores and 40 years, he can still write music as beautiful and engaging as that heard in this score, I hope it never ends.

Focus on: strings, woodwinds, lyrical chords, lamenting male singers, Sicilian dialect, ethnic woodwinds, North African flavor, pastoral, lilting guitars, playful woodwinds, irregular rhythms, howling trumpets

sinfonia per baaria

baaria

brindisi

la visita

il vento, il mare, i silenzi

114-8505 RED SONJA

Cashing in on the popular success of Conan the Barbarian and the various other sword-and-sorcery epics of the early 1980s was Red Sonja, the tale of a barbarian warrior princess, based on the original story by Robert Howard, the creator of Conan, and directed by Richard Fleischer. The film starred Brigitte Nielsen, the Danish supermodel and future wife of Sylvester Stallone in her first acting job, in the title role as a woman seeking vengeance upon those who murdered her parents, while simultaneously embarking on a quest to find a magical talisman whose power could destroy the world. Despite the presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a supporting role as the legendary swordsman Lord Kalidor, the film was critically decimated, receiving brickbats for its acting, writing, direction, and wooden action sequences. In fact, possibly the only member of the cast and crew of Red Sonja to escape unscathed was the legendary composer Ennio Morricone, who unexpectedly found himself scoring the movie.

Morricone was splitting his time fairly evenly between Europe and Hollywood in the mid 1980s – his output around that time included such classics as Once Upon a Time in America in 1984 and The Mission in 1986 – so for him to have scored a fairly mainstream movie like Red Sonja was not out of the ordinary, especially considering that the film was shot mainly in Italy with a predominantly Italian crew. Morricone was not entirely new to the fantasy genre either, having scored the little-known Anglo-Spanish effort Hundra in 1983, whose star Laurene London was also considered for the Red Sonja title role. In fact there are a number of conceptual similarities between Red Sonja and Hundra, including the overall tone of Morricone’s music, which was adventurous and bombastic. In many ways, Red Sonja can be seen as a blending of Morricone’s own fantasy style with some of the compositional touches Basil Poledouris brought to his Conan scores, especially in terms of the choral writing, and the prominent use of solo trumpets and lyrical woodwinds to lead the thematic lines. As such, anyone who knows and enjoys any of those works will find much to their liking here too.

After a brief diversion for a cooing choir in the magical “Prologue,” the “Main Title” presents a rousing performance of a heroic, galloping theme for solo trumpet, which is passed around different sections of the orchestra as it progresses, even picking up a wordless choir during the cue’s second half. Many believe this to be Sonja’s theme, but it isn’t – it’s actually the theme for Lord Kalidor, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, who trains and guides Sonja throughout the story, and eventually becomes her lover. Although some may consider it to be too light and bouncy for a character intended to have a great deal of power and nobility, I’ve always really liked it. It’s a typical Morricone piece, and has a great deal in common with some of his spaghetti western themes, which often subverted the conventions of the genre by giving a vaguely comical aspect to their stoic heroes. Its subsequent recapitulations, in cues like “Vanna’s Death,” are welcome.

Sonja’s theme is actually a more intimate, gently romantic idea, a six-note rising and falling motif for woodwinds and strings, which is less about raw power and barbarism, and more of a lament, reflecting on the terrible wrongs done to her, and the honorable nature of her quest. You don’t really hear it until the second half of “Vanna’s Death” – the actual catalyst for Sonja’s mission – but its performances in that cue, and subsequently in “Sonja Teaches Tarn,” “Kalidor and Sonja,” and “A Fair Fight” are really lovely. Morricone often adorns the theme with a softly intonating choir and pretty harp glissandi, to further enhance the sense of righteousness that follows Sonja, while in the “End Credits” he adds a light pop rhythm section and solo trumpet flourishes, concluding the score on a surprisingly contemporary note.

The action music is powerful and aggressive, which is not something Morricone is known for. Each of the score’s main action cues – “Temple Raid,” “Fighting the Soldiers,” and “Sonja Defeats the Queen” – is built around a shrill, rising motif for complementary strings and brass, accompanied by great booming timpani hits, and a choir singing variations of the word ‘Sonja’. This last element should, under normal circumstances, reduce the score to a laughing stock – it did on Leonard Rosenman’s Robocop 2 – but the sincerity of the performances, and the creativity of the musical ideas somehow make it work. Morricone has always been able to take ideas which, on paper, sound ludicrous – who knew that the combination of bass flute, electric guitar, coyote noises, and people whistling and grunting could become the legendary theme for The Good the Bad and the Ugly? – and Red Sonja continues that trend.

Other cues of note include the religioso harp and choir motif for “The Talisman,” which appears later in cues such as “Touch It” and the extended “The Chamber of Lights”; the superb restatement of the magical theme from the Prologue in “Sonja and the Sword Master”; and the nervous, staccato action sequences in “Sonia vs. Brytag” and “Entering the Castle,” which owe a great debt to the off-kilter rhythms from his 1970s suspense scores, including Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

Like many scores from this era, the release history of Red Sonja’s soundtrack is checkered and complicated. It was released on vinyl LP by Varese Sarabande at the time of the film’s release, but it was sequenced oddly, being presented as two long “Symphonic Suites for Chorus and Orchestra,” lasting 17 and 19 minutes respectively. The two Symphonic Suites were released on CD for the first time in 1990, coupled with Morricone’s score for the film Bloodline, as part of the Varese Sarabande CD Club, but that album quickly went out of print and became a highly prized collectible. Fans of the score would have to wait another 20 years for its first ‘proper release’, sequenced and broken down into individual cues, when Robin Esterhammer’s boutique label Perseverance Records released it as a 2000-copy limited edition in 2010. This is, by far, the recommended presentation of the score, and is the one people should seek out.

I think many people find themselves quite overwhelmed by Ennio Morricone’s vast filmography and discography, and don’t know where to go next once they have added the half dozen or so ‘essentials’ to their collections. With that in mind, I would not hesitate to recommend Red Sonja to people who want to explore some of Morricone’s less famous works. It has all the compositional hallmarks and stylistic ideas that make him such a wonderful composer, but it is much more accessible than many of his more experimental scores. The excellent trio of central themes, the exciting action music, and the overall ‘straightforwardness’ of the sound make it a more than worthwhile diversion.

Focus on: Basil Poledouris, Solo trumpet, orchestra, choir, six-note ascenders and descenders for woodwinds and strings, harp slide, brass instruments, bass flute, electric guitar, coyote voice, whistles, religious harp, choir

Symphonic suite for chorus and orchestra part 2

If the information on the Internet Movie Database is correct, En Mai Fais Ce Qu’il te Plaît is the 521st score of Ennio Morricone’s career, which stretches back to his first score, Il Federale, in 1961. In the intervening 54 years the Italian has written some of the most iconic music in the history of cinema; En Mai Fais Ce Qu’il te Plaît will likely not be remembered as one of his standout works but, considering the fact that he is now aged 86, that he is writing film music at all is a minor miracle. That it’s still this good is nothing short of astonishing. The film – the title of which translates to Darling Buds of May in English – is a French drama written and directed by Christian Carion, who previously directed the well regarded films Une Hirondelle a Fait le Printemps and Joyeux Noël. Set during the early days of World War II, the story follows a group of people from a small village in Pas-de-Calais in northern France, who flee from the advancing German troops, and essentially become homeless, traversing the French countryside trying to avoid the Nazis, while trying to retain some semblance of a normal life under new, terrible circumstances.

The score is quintessential Ennio Morricone. Conducted and orchestrated by the great man himself, it contains a pair of utterly magnificent central themes, sweet and romantic but also deeply melancholic, which are offset by some more dramatic suspense music accompanying the threat of war that displaces the families from their village. After a several minutes of minimalist buildup for strings and organ, the opening cue, “En Mai,” gradually emerges from its repetitive four-note base into a simply stunning main theme, redolent of summer time, rolling countryside, and a tranquil environment.

Morricone embraces this style of writing in several subsequent cues. “Ils Resteront Trois” introduces the secondary theme, for the lead character, Paul, and his wife and son. It’s one of those heart-meltingly gorgeous melodies that only Morricone can write, and has a hint of Cinema Paradiso to it, especially in the string harmonies, but the return of the subtle organ orchestration from the opening cue gives it a slightly religioso quality too, that is both appropriate and appealing. Later, “Tout Laisser” embraces some hints of traditional Gallic folk music, stripped down to just an accordion, harmonica, and solo violin, and has a bittersweet sense of loss and regret, before returning to restate the Family theme, again with a wash of melancholy strings. The subsequent “Respirations” is filled with a sense of relief, of families being reunited, and the simple pleasure of being with the ones you love.

Meanwhile, “L’Étau se Resserre” and “Traverser la Guerre” are filled with tension and apprehension, with tremolo string writing and plucked bass notes that gradually give way to more strident phrases for violins and moody, slightly mysterious-sounding oboes. Similarly, “Ils Arrivent” has a martial cadence and a sense of quiet, stark desperation, with high, pulsating strings and staccato muted brass writing that briefly recalls the similar-sounding militaristic tones of his score for Indagine su un Cittadino al di Sopra di Ogni Sospetto from 1970. These cues are clearly intended to musically depict the looming threat of the Germans, storming over the border and leaving destruction in their wake; although none of these cues are truly devastating in their depiction of war, they impart instead a sense of resignation and sadness, with the citizens of Pas-de-Calais having lost their homes, their livelihoods, and their peace of mind.

The elegant flute writing of “Tous Ensemble” has an unexpected playfulness to it, again conveying a light and summery air, completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the film. The final two cues, “Et Même les Animaux Sont Avec Eux” and “A la Recherche de la Paix”, are deeply moving, allowing the performance of the Roma Sinfionetta to rise to the fore with statements of both main themes. The emotional quality of the music really shines through in the first cue, recalling works like Casualties of War and A Time of Destiny, eulogizing the losses that war brings to everyone, while celebrating the stoicism and optimism that humanity can, somehow, maintain in the most desperate conditions. However, Morricone saves the best for last; the stirring solo trumpet performance that anchors the first half of the final cue is especially lovely, having a wistful and nostalgic quality, and an air of remembrance that is wholly appropriate. When the solo female vocalist enters for the first and only time during the second half of the cue, providing haunting counterpoint to the orchestral performance of the main theme, the effect is sensational. Edda dell’Orso would be proud.

No-one writes film music like Ennio Morricone, and no-one else ever will. He has successfully written music in every conceivable genre, and has been a groundbreaking trailblazer in all of them. However, despite how creative his western and thriller scores are, and despite how much innovation he has brought to the table throughout the decades, it is his drama and romance writing that holds a special place in my heart. Although he clearly has a signature sound, with familiar chord progressions and instrumental combinations that span the decades, his capacity for writing utterly spellbinding, ridiculously beautiful themes is simply unparalleled, and En Mai Fais Ce Qu’il te Plaît is another one that we can add to that canon. Of course, as I said earlier, it will never be mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in America, The Red Tent, or my own personal favorite, La Califfa, but considering his advancing years, anything Ennio Morricone writes these days should be cherished. En Mai Fais Ce Qu’il te Plaît is an essential purchase for fans of the maestro’s work.

,Focus on: Edda dell'Orso , suspenseful music, string harmony, organ, religious overtones, traditional Gallic folk music, accordion, harmonica, solo violin, vibrato strings, plucked bass, violin, oboe, soft brass, militaristic tones, female soloist singer

En mai (08:56)

Ils arrivent (03:39)

A la recherche de la paix  (06:29)

Ennio Morricone has been providing music for Quentin Tarantino’s films for a long time, but it is only recently that he has done so intentionally. Tarantino’s first six films – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof, and Inglourious Basterds – featured an eclectic, hand-picked selection of music comprising classic rock songs and score cuts from Tarantino’s favorite movies. Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds most notably made use of music from several classic Morricone scores, including tracks from films such as Navajo Joe, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, The Big Gundown, Revolver, and Allonsanfàn, among others. Tarantino has been both praised and criticized for this approach; some love his idiosyncratic re-purposing of this music in a new and vital setting, while others say that their familiarity with some of the pieces causes a disconnect, diminishing their impact in their new context. Years ago, when questioned about his musical ideology, Tarantino said that he didn’t trust any composer enough to understand, and then musically reinterpret, his cinematic visions – the “soul of his movie”. Tarantino’s stance on this matter began to soften somewhat prior to his seventh film, Django Unchained, and at one point the rumor was that Ennio Morricone had agreed to score it – if anyone could get Tarantino to change his mind about the impact and importance of an original score, it would be Morricone. However, circumstances led to this not happening, and the final soundtrack featured an original Morricone song, “Ancora Qui,” but no original score.

Subsequent to the release of Django Unchained, Morricone apparently made several disparaging statements about Tarantino, saying he used music “without coherence” and that he “wouldn’t work with him again, on anything,” rendering the prospect of a true Tarantino-Morricone collaboration increasingly unlikely. However, when Tarantino began work on The Hateful Eight, rumors again began to emerge that Tarantino and Morricone had reconciled, and that the composer would write the film’s original score. This time, the rumors were true, and Morricone began working on the music; originally, Tarantino planned to have Morricone just write an overture and a main theme, and use unused music from Morricone’s score for the 1982 sci-fi film The Thing for the rest of the score, but Morricone was so inspired by the film that he kept writing, and ultimately provided Tarantino with 50 minutes of original music. The final mix of the film does include three tracks from Morricone’s score for The Thing – “Eternity,” “Bestiality,” and “Despair” – as well as one cue, “Regan’s Theme (Floating Sound),” from the score for Exorcist II: The Heretic, but the bulk of it is brand new, a first for a Tarantino film.

The Hateful Eight is a mystery whodunit presented as a western; it stars Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson as a pair of bounty hunters travelling by wagon through the mountains of Wyoming to the city of Red Rock to collect their spoils; Russell is transporting a live prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is scheduled to hang for murder. All of Jackson’s prisoners are already dead. After picking up a third man (Walton Goggins) who claims to be Red Rock’s new sheriff, their wagon is caught in a massive snowstorm, and the travelers are forced to seek refuge at an isolated way station where four others – Demián Bichir, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, and Tim Roth – are already sheltering. Before long, discord and mistrust between the eight develops, with jealousy, bitterness, and racial tensions left over from the civil war coming to the surface. The Hateful Eight contains all Tarantino’s trademarks – expletive-laden and verbose dialogue, gallows humor, idiosyncratic narrative jumps, brutal violence – but it’s also an exceptionally beautiful film, with veteran cinematographer Robert Richardson capturing some spectacular snowy mountain landscapes, and production designer Yohei Taneda re-creating the look of post-Civil War era America with great authenticity. It is also helped immeasurably by Morricone’s music, which ratchets up the tension to almost unbearable levels.

Ennio Morricone is known for his music for westerns – scores like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good the Bad and the Ugly are legendary – but he actually hasn’t scored one since the little-known Bud Spencer film Occio Alla Penna in 1981, 34 years ago. It’s also been quite some time since Morricone has written the score for a (fairly) mainstream American film, the last being Ripley’s Game in 2002, although the last one to have any kind of wide release was probably Mission to Mars in 2000. As such, The Hateful Eight is something of a landmark release for film music aficionados, and should be celebrated as such. The phrase ‘Morricone western’ has certain musical connotations that lead to preconceptions of what the score will sound like; however, ever the innovator, Morricone’s score for The Hateful Eight sounds nothing like those classic Sergio Leone movies, and instead has much more in common with his suspense-filled thrillers of the 1970s and 80s, especially things like Città Violenta, La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso, the aforementioned Revolver, Massacre in Rome, Peur Sur La Ville, and The Untouchables. The Hateful Eight is a tense film, balanced on a knife-edge of hair-trigger anger, and as such those tight, intense rhythmic ideas play much more into Tarantino’s vision.

The first main theme of the score is “L’Ultima Diligenza di Red Rock,” a nervous-sounding march built around a 16-note thematic motif, with repeated ideas for bassoon, contra-bassoon, and tuba, all of which is underpinned by an unexpectedly contemporary hi-hat cymbal lick and stark, stabbing strings. Morricone says, “the sound these instruments produce can express the drama, the rage, the despair and the irony that are the main themes of Tarantino’s story. They are a healthy, bodily sound. They also express a criticism towards the leading characters of the film.” As the piece develops it adds new touches to the orchestration – muted trumpets which echo off each other, a thunderous drum interlude – and even presents a B-phrase, a swirling sort of action motif accentuated with gruffly chanting male voices. It’s a quite wonderful piece, full of ominous anticipation, hinting at the carnage to come, but which remains thoroughly musical throughout, progressing intelligently with rhythmic and instrumental variation for its entire 7½ minute length.

The second main theme is “Neve,” a cold, desolate piece for austere high strings, gently fluttering oboes, and an incessant metallic pulse intended to mimic a ticking clock, a musical conceit Morricone has explored before in his scores for A Few Dollars More and Il Mio Nome é Nessuno. It seems to have a sense of inevitability, with a hint of violence buried deep within, and is quite brilliant in the way it ratchets up the tension. It actually appears initially in the “Overture,” where it sometimes plays in counterpoint to the Red Rock theme, and later forms the backbone of “Narratore Letterario,” where again the contrapuntal writing for both themes is in evidence, but gets its fullest explorations in the three “Neve” pieces. The longest, clocking in at an astonishing 12 minutes, is an exercise in patient audience manipulation, as Morricone presents different shifting layers of sound, overlapping instruments, fading in and out, hinting at themes, in a masterful way.

The score is built almost entirely around these two recurring ideas. The shorter version of “L’Ultima Diligenza di Red Rock” in the seventh track focuses mainly on the more agitated string writing and chanting voices, to superb effect. “I Quattro Passeggeri” revisits the ominous duet between the bassoon and contrabassoon, and the most aggressive performance of the Red Rock theme comes during the gripping “Sangue e Neve,” while “La Musica Prima del Massacro” is the literal calm before the storm, with the gentle glockenspiel motif and the gossamer woodwinds providing a counter-intuitively pretty prelude to the violence to come.

But this is not all the score has to offer. Elsewhere, Morricone engages in some quite brutal brass-led dissonance, most notably towards the end of “Narratore Letterario,” and later in “Sei Cavalli.” Balletic, almost impressionistic, interplay between different parts of the woodwind section earmarks “Raggi di Sole Sulla Montagna” as an intriguing cue. The two “L’Inferno Bianco” cues alternate synths for brasses while presenting a nervous frenzy of rapid-fire percussion and penetrative pizzicato string writing. The one hint of warmth comes during the finale, “La Lettera di Lincoln,” during which Morricone presents a noble, patriotic-sounding trumpet melody reminiscent of the funeral piece from Il Ritorno di Ringo that Clint Eastwood used over the end credits of his film American Sniper.

Of course, with Tarantino being Tarantino, he pads out his soundtrack album with several dialogue tracks, Jennifer Jason Leigh singing an old Australian folk ballad, and a handful of songs, including “Apple Blossom” by The White Stripes, “Now You’re All Alone” by David Hess from the soundtrack to the film The Last House on the Left, and “There Won’t Be Many Coming Home” by Roy Orbison, written for the 1967 film The Fastest Guitar Alive, in which Orbison played the leading role. The songs are all actually very good, but the dialogue tracks can be easily programmed out for more fluid listening experience – thankfully, Tarantino was wise enough not to layer them over Morricone’s music. None of the cues from The Thing or Exorcist II: The Heretic are included on the soundtrack, and unfortunately neither is the beautiful country song “Ready for the Times to Get Better” by Crystal Gayle, which plays over a montage sequence.

The Hateful Eight is brilliant music by anyone’s standards, but the fact that it was composed by Ennio Morricone at the age of 87 is nothing short of remarkable. Despite his advancing years and less-than-perfect health, Morricone has proven here that he remains a vital, interesting, relevant composer capable of writing surprising and challenging music for top-tier films, just as he has been doing since he first burst onto the world stage in 1964. It would have been so easy for him to dig into his back catalogue and ape a couple of his classic Spaghetti Western scores – and, in all probability, many people were hoping that he would do just that, including Quentin Tarantino – but the fact that Morricone saw that this film needed something different is testament to his deep understanding of film, his capacity for innovation, and his standing as one of the true greats working in film music anywhere in the world.

Focus on: Words to focus on: Bassoon, bassoon, tuba, modern hi-hat licks, distinctive harsh strings, soft trumpets, thunderous drums, swirling action themes, softly fluttering oboes, constant metallic pulses, More agitated strings, an ominous duet between bassoon and bassoon, a gentle glockenspiel theme, gossamer woodwinds, brutal brass-led dissonance, brass synths, penetrating pizzicatos Play the strings. A noble, patriotic trumpet melody, Australian folk song, one of the truly great names in film music anywhere in the world

L'Ultima Diligenza Di Red Rock - Versione Integrale (07:33)

Neve - Versione Integrale (12:17)

I Quattro Passeggeri  (01:50)

Narratore Letterario (02:02)

La Lettera Di Lincoln – Strumentale  (01:42)

Apple Blossom (02:15) The White Stripes

There are moments in film music history where you can listen to a score, and upon its conclusion sit back and be content in the knowledge that you have just experienced a genuine masterpiece. It doesn’t happen very often, because it has to be a perfect combination of everything that can possibly make a film score great. It has to fit the film, of course, carrying the story and enhancing the drama and elevating it to a point where the two seem inseparable, and where the film would be immeasurably diminished by it not being there. But then it also has to have all those things that make it excellent as pure music – everything from recurring themes that develop through the score, to orchestration, technique, and those intangibles of “beauty” and “memorability,” which of course are purely subjective, but nevertheless often affect a wide range of people in similar emotional ways. Ennio Morricone’s 1986 score for The Mission is, undoubtedly, one of those scores which ticks every box, a masterpiece on every conceivable level.

The film, which was directed by Roland Joffé, stars Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn, Cherie Lunghi, and Liam Neeson. It is set in South America in the 1740s, and explores issues of faith and morality through the eyes of various Jesuit priests and other religious figures, as they work to convert the native Guaraní population to Christianity. De Niro plays Mendoza, a mercenary and slave-trader, who renounces his former ways and seeks to make amends by helping Father Gabriel (Irons) build a mission church in a Guaraní village. However, conflict emerges when a political treaty transfers control of the area from the Spanish to the Portuguese; the Portuguese, who allow slavery where the Spanish do not, embark on a series of raids to collect slaves from the Guaraní community, with the blessing of the local colonial government, and with the tacit approval of the Vatican itself. However, Mendoza, Gabriel, and their colleague Father Fielding (Neeson) vow to protect the natives, even if it means sacrificing their own lives in the process.

Although the film was lauded by most critics, and received seven Oscar nominations including one for Best Picture, The Mission was unfortunately not a success at the box office – its convoluted plot, labyrinthine political and ecclesiastical machinations, and long periods of introspective ‘scenery footage’ left audiences alienated from the core story. However, Ennio Morricone’s score for the The Mission vastly outstripped the legacy and fame of the film for which it was written, and in the intervening thirty years has gone on to be lauded as one of the most significant film scores written during the 1980s. Trying to pinpoint what makes Morricone’s score so wonderful is almost a futile exercise, but I’ll start where most people start: with the themes.

Unsurprisingly for a film of this scope, there are no less than three recurring main themes weaving through the score, as well as several minor ones which appear more infrequently. The first, which relates to the Guaraní mission itself, is first heard in the opening cue “On Earth as It Is in Heaven,” which is actually the end titles track. A rhythmic theme for harpsichord, strings, and a Latin choir, it gradually picks up a bed of ethnic percussion that increases its rhythmic core, as well as a contrapuntal statement of Gabriel’s theme (more on that later) that underpins the choral chanting and speaks to the culture clash at the center of the story – that between western civilization and the church, and the Guaraní themselves. The second theme is “Falls,” a stunningly beautiful melody for harp and strings, which picks up a blissful pan flute element, and a dramatic (if almost subliminal) plucked bass, which gradually swells into a spine-chilling performance for the full orchestra. This theme relates specifically to the Iguazú Falls, an immense waterfall which today marks part of the international border between Brazil and Argentina, and which has an ancient importance as the center of Guaraní culture.

The third theme is arguably the most famous: “Gabriel’s Oboe,” which is initially performed on-screen by Jeremy Irons’s character. Astonishingly, Morricone wrote the theme by watching the randomly improvised finger movements Irons acted during that first scene, and matching the music to those movements, as if that was what Irons had been playing all along. The fact that Morricone could write such a haunting, evocative, legendary theme from this basis is astonishing; the simple orchestration for oboe, strings, and harpsichord is sublime, capturing perfectly the essence of the peaceful, gentle Father Gabriel, who enchants and gains the trust of the Guaraní with his beautiful music.

These three themes form the cornerstone of the entire score. On any other film, just one of these staggeringly beautiful pieces would have been enough to earmark it as a classic, but the fact that Morricone wrote them all for one film is wonderful overkill of the highest order. Cleverly, Morricone allows his themes to develop and refine in subsequent scenes. In “Vita Nostra,” for example, he introduces a tribal variation on Gabriel’s theme transposed to flute, accompanied by ethnic drums, and offset by a contrapuntal performance of the chanted Mission theme.

In “Climb” Morricone gives a slow, steady, relentless performance of the Falls theme that ascends through the string section, until the final rapturous performance of the theme as Liam Neeson’s character Father Fielding successfully makes the dangerous ascent up the Iguazú Falls to join Gabriel at the mission. Later, in “Remorse,” Morricone re-orchestrates the Falls theme into a dark, churning variation for low, throaty strings, ruminating on Mendoza’s actions and his need for salvation, and the difficult challenge Gabriel imposes on him as atonement. The tortured harmonics of this cue has echoes of both Bernard Herrmann and Wojciech Kilar in their depiction of intense psychological damage, and it’s a testament to Morricone’s skill that he can re-arrange such a beautiful theme and make it sound so aghast.

Other cues which contain notable thematic variations include “The Mission,” which reprises the Falls theme with gentle, welcoming peacefulness, and in which flutes trill like birds fluttering through tree tops, speaking to the idyllic nature of Father Gabriel’s paradise haven. Later, “River” reprises the Mission theme to underscore a scene where a Vatican official is serenaded by Guaraní as he journeys up the Iguazú river to visit Gabriel’s mission; the celebratory brass trills, and the gradual intensification of the singing, reminds me of the wonderful finale from his 1969 score Queimada!

If that were not enough, Morricone also was able to write two pieces of liturgical choral music, “Ave Maria Guaraní” and “Te Deum Guaraní,” both of which are performed by a solo choir of South American natives. Their layered vocal harmonies are ragged and raw, but somehow rousing and deeply spiritual, and sound so authentic and ancient-sounding you can’t quite believe they were written and performed in 1986. There is also a secondary theme, “Brothers,” representing the relationship between Mendoza and his brother Felipe (Quinn); the gentle, sentimental theme for guitar, flute, and strings, speaks to their strong fraternal relationship before love and betrayal tears them apart – this secondary part is addressed in the subsequent “Carlotta,” where the guitars are darker, alluding to the fact that Carlotta (Lunghi) herself is the catalyst for the breakdown of the brothers’ relationship, and Mendoza’s subsequent quest for redemption and forgiveness.

Much of the last third of the score is given over to moments of tension and anticipation, building up to the climactic confrontation between Gabriel and Mendoza’s group of Guaraní warriors, and the mighty forces of the Portuguese colonial army. “Penance” features the low, throbbing bassoon writing that Morricone would later use to excellent effect in The Hateful Eight; the swirling central figure is gradually joined by strings, brass accents, and percussion, growing and building almost obsessively. Later, “Refusal” is the first of several cues full of stark tension, a collision of fluttering pan flutes, rumbling percussion, and militaristic bugles underpinned by brutal piano chords. This abstract, dissonant writing recalls some of Morricone’s work for director Gillo Pontecorvo in the 1960s, especially scores like The Battle of Algiers, and carries on through the subsequent “Asuncíon,” “Alone,” and “Guaraní”.

“The Sword” features the final statement of Gabriel’s theme, albeit with a merest hint of swashbuckling panache through a series of brass and piano flourishes that recall the trumpet fanfares from the Refusal cue, signifying again the clash of cultures as the militaristic colonials go head-to-head with the peaceful, pacifist Jesuits. The last stand of the Jesuits is represented by a transference of Gabriel’s theme to bass flute, dark and full of regret, before the conclusive “Miserere,” a solemn, ridiculously beautiful solo boy soprano performance of the Mission theme.

However, talking about the themes in such a way really doesn’t go any way towards explaining what Morricone does with them, which is a large part of the score’s genius. With this music, Morricone paints a picture of the Amazon jungle as a vast, beautiful, unspoiled wilderness, a celebration of one of God’s most beautiful creations on Earth. He depicts the Jesuit priests as humble, holy men, genuinely trying to help the Guaraní and bring them into the (at the time) modern world. He juxtaposes scenes of death and violence with music of such grace and beauty that the resulting imagery seems almost dream-like; the film’s iconic shot of another priest, condemned to die by the Guaraní, floating serenely down the river and over the Iguazú Falls on a makeshift cross, would be horrific were it not for Morricone’s wonderful music, which instead characterizes the priest’s sacrifice as heavenly martyrdom.

Talking about the themes in such a way also doesn’t explain why this score, amongst all others, is one of the few film themes to achieve a level of enduring popularity amongst the general public. One can never predict when a theme from a movie will enter public consciousness and transcend the film for which it was written, but The Mission certainly has. There is something intangibly appealing, indescribably primal, about Morricone’s writing on this score; it taps into and speaks to some sort of dormant spirituality that people all over the world somehow connect with. I’m not a religious man, but Morricone certainly is, and the film’s universal themes of giving glory and reverence to a higher power clearly inspired him to musically express himself at an unprecedented high level. It is perhaps no surprise that “Gabriel’s Oboe” has been arranged into the classical repertoire for several celebrated soloists, and was given Italian lyrics by writer Chiara Ferraù in 1998 prior to being recorded as ‘Nella Fantasia’ by soprano Sarah Brightman. This level of public awareness and acclaim is something that Morricone shares with just a few other film composers in the history of film music – John Williams、Henry Mancini and John Barry among them.

Talking about the themes in such a way also doesn’t explain the level of compositional excellence Morricone displays on The Mission. I don’t have the technical knowledge to describe it properly, but you can just feel that this is outstanding music on a pure, intellectual level. The way all three of his main themes are able to play against each other contrapuntally, despite them all being clearly and identifiably different from one another, illustrates the great lengths Morricone took to structure his music in such a way that it can convey complicated, sometimes conflicting, emotional nuances simultaneously. The way Morricone is able to tweak the key, the tempo, or the orchestration of his themes to depict subtle differences in dramatic intent is also consistently superb. I honestly believe that, had this exact same music been written in the 1800s, for either a play or a ballet or simply as a celebration of the glory of God, this music would be part of today’s classical repertoire, acclaimed by even the most devoutly anti-film music snobs.

In what is undoubtedly one of the worst decisions in Academy history, Ennio Morricone lost the 1986 Oscar for Best Score to Herbie Hancock’s Round Midnight, which contained barely 15 minutes of original music, and was instead loaded with classic jazz standards. Although the jazz pieces were admittedly performed by some of the most legendary jazz artists alive in the 1980s, and are very good, Oscar voters clearly voted for the classic non-original work heard in that film rather than for Hancock’s minimal original contributions; as such, Morricone not winning for what is inarguably one of the greatest achievements in the history of film music is one of the biggest Oscar-related miscarriages of justice.

People often talk about ‘essential’ scores, and sometimes we get carried away by recommending things that may not live up to their hype, but The Mission really is something different. It’s perhaps the one, single, perfect example of what makes Ennio Morricone a genius – thematically, intellectually, emotionally, and dramatically – and why, even thirty years down the line, he is still a vital and important voice in world film music. There are other landmark scores in his canon – The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America, and Cinema Paradiso among them – but I honestly believe that The Mission represents the pinnacle of his career as a composer It’s by far the best score of 1986, ranks in the Top 10 scores of the entire 1980s, and easily makes the list of the greatest 100 scores ever written.

Focus on: Bernard Herrmann，Wojciech Kilar，Chiara Ferraù，John Williams, Henry Mancini，John Barry, Herbie Hancock, harpsichord, strings, Latin choir, ethnic percussion, harp, strings, blissful pan flute elements, dramatic (almost subliminal) plucked bass, harpsichord, flute, ethnic drums, flute Trills, brass trills, liturgical choral music, low, throbbing bassoons, pan flutes, rumbling percussion, militaristic horns, flourishes of brass and piano, trumpets, bass flutes,

On earth as it is heaven

Falls

Gabriel's oboe

Vita nostra

Climb

Remorse

Ava maria Guarani

Miserere

the strength of the righteous (main title)

al capone

Ness and his family

machine gun lulluby

the untouchables

Original Review by Craig Lysy

As a young small town Sicilian boy, director Giuseppe Tornatore fell in love with the cinema where he would spend hours every day insatiably viewing films. With the advent of television and the VCR, many believed that the days of the town cinema were numbered. This film abounds with nostalgia as Tornatore explores his movie going memories and how they affected his life. Drawing from his own life experiences, he crafted a screenplay, which secured the financial backing of the French production company Les Films Ariane. A fine cast was assembled, which included; Philippe Noiret as Alfredo, Salvatore Cascio as Salvatore Di Vita (child), Marco Leonardo as Salvatore Di Vita (adolescent), Jacques Perrin as Salvatore Di Vita (adult), Agnese Nano as Elena Mendola (young), Leopoldo Trieste as Father Adelfio, Antonella Attili as Maria (young), Pupella Maggio as Maria (adult) and Isa Danieli as Ana. Salvatore Di Vita, aka Toto, is a precocious kid who falls in love with movies shown at his town’s theater, Cinema Paradiso. It comes to pass that he worms his way into the heart of projectionist Alfredo, who befriends him and takes him on as his apprentice. Over time Salvatore masters the projector and often runs it himself. So great is his love of movies that he buys a movie camera and begins making his own home movies. Tragedy strikes one night when the Cinema Paradiso catches fire and burns down, with Salvatore saving Alfredo’s life, but not before he is badly burned and blinded.

After the Cinema Paradiso is rebuilt, Salvatore, now in high school runs the projector and falls in love with Elena a beautiful girl from a wealthy family. She loves him, but her father will not allow her to marry down, moving his family out of town to ensure this. Alfredo counsels Salvatore to seek his fortunes in Rome, as he will never realize his dreams in Giancaldo. He leaves his small town and prospers; achieving success in the film industry, but never recovers from losing Elena. Years later he sadly returns home to attend Alfredo’s funeral. He sees the wisdom of Alfredo’s counsel to seek his fortunes elsewhere as the town has remained small and unchanged. Alfredo’s widow gives him a parting gift, a movie reel created by Alfredo, which he treasures. When he plays it back in Rome he is brought to tears as it contains all the cut-out scenes of people kissing, which the town priest had demanded Alfredo remove to ensure public decency. The film was a commercial success, and received universal critical acclaim, securing a single Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, which it won. Today it is considered a classic film, achieving a ranking of 27 in Empire Magazine’s “The 100 Best Films of World Cinema” in 2010.

Ennio Morricone was renown in the European film industry and he was Tornatore’s first choice. Morricone understood that the film was in many ways, a biopic of Tornatore’s life, which would be best served by a small ensemble so as to provide intimacy. Solo wind instruments, piano, celeste, strings, and alto saxophone would carry the bulk of the score, which would speak to the film’s three animating emotions; nostalgia, love, and melancholia. The score would be supported by three primary themes; the wistful Main Theme abounds with nostalgia and offers a romantic ten-note melody born by string quartet, piano, and alto saxophone, which cause us to succumb to tears. For me, Morricone perfectly captures the film’s emotional core, a man’s bittersweet reminiscence. Toto’s Theme serves as his identity. Born by celeste, flute, and strings, it emotes as a valzer giocoso, which perfectly captures his youthful spirit. It is playful, carried by a variety of solo woodwinds or alto saxophone. The film’s most notable theme is the Love Theme, composed by Morricone’s youngest son Andrea. It speaks to the love of Salvatore and Elena, and is emoted by an alto saxophone, piano gentile and strings romantico. Rounding out the score would be the requisite source music of the time as well as the actual film scores of the film’s showing at the Cinema Paradiso. The review properly sequences the cues in film sequence.

The film opens with “Cinema Paradiso”, a sublime score highlight where Morricone graces us with one of the finest film openings in his canon. We look out from Salvatore’s home in Giancaldo Sicily past a drape fluttering in the breeze to behold a vast shimmering sea. As the opening credits roll, Morricone sets the tone of the film and captures its emotional core with a wondrous full rendering of his Main Theme. The melody is wistful and flows over us so full of nostalgia. Bravo. We flow seamlessly into “Maturity” where Salvatore’s mother and sister try to telephone him in Rome. We are informed of her sadness, as he has not been home to visit for thirty years. Morricone bathes us with melancholia with solo guitar, flute and strings doloroso. Only the first 48 seconds of the cue were used in the film. The remaining part of the cue reveals tension in the guitar, which never resolves as Salvatore is informed by his girl friend of his mother’s advisory that Alfredo has died. The news of Alfredo’s death saddens Salvatore in “First Youth” where we see him flash back to his youth. He is an altar boy, earning a reprimand from Father Adelfio as he struggles to stay awake during mass. Morricone supports our introduction to young Salvatore with a tender rendering of Toto’s Theme born by celeste, flute, and strings. His theme emotes as a valzer giocoso, which perfectly captures his irrepressible youthful spirit.

“Childhood And Manhood” offers a score highlight. Toto visits Alfredo in the projection room as he splices out all the kissing scenes demanded by Father Adelfio. They begin to forge a bond and as Toto departs, he steals some of the excised film scenes. As he views the scenes at home by candlelight, his mother looks on with bemusement. When he asks why papa has not come home from the war, his mother reassures him that he will some day. Morricone supports the scenes with a beautiful extended rendering of Toto’s Theme, which graces us with a transfer of the melodic line from solo violin, to flute delicato, to alto saxophone, and lastly to kindred woodwinds and piano. “While Thinking About Her Again” reveals Toto exiting the theater only to discover his mother waiting for him. When he tells her he spent the milk money to buy a ticket she begins slapping him. Alfredo comes to his rescue and offers her ‘money he found under the seats’. Morricone supports the scene with sad melody kindred to the Main Theme, which never resolves, thus informing us that Maria understands Toto’s love for the cinema. In “Toto And Alfredo” Toto feigns hurting his foot as he walks home from a funeral with Father Adelfio. Alfredo’s hoist him up on his bike and takes him home. A tender rendering of Toto’s Theme emoted by solo violin and flute carries their progress. We can see that Toto and Alfredo are bonding.

An extended rendering of Toto’s Theme, not included on the album, supports a montage of scenes where Alfredo completes Toto’s training in the projection room. In a subsequent scene where Maria receives the tragic news that her husband has been declared dead, she walks home devastated and weeping with Toto. Morricone supports her anguish with a reprise of the Main Theme, which carries their progress. This cue is also not found on the album. “Cinema On Fire” offers the score’s most dramatic cue. Fire breaks out in the projection room and Alfredo is unable to contain it, as an exploding reel of film blinds him. Dire strings rise in their register and launch a horrific ostinato with trumpet blasts as the conflagration consumes the projection room. At 1:24 the ostinato resets and carries Toto upwards in his rescue of Alfredo. He pulls him down the stairs to safety and cries for help. At 2:15 a diminuendo upon a grim string sustain and drums of doom supports an exhausted Toto’s cries for help. In “After The Destruction” we are graced with another fine string born exposition of the Main Theme. Father Adelfio wonders how the town will fare with no entertainment, as they are too poor to rebuild it. Morricone supports the sadness of the moment with a plaintive rendering of the Main Theme. Yet fortune comes in the guise of a man who won the lottery, who agrees to reopen the Cinema Paradiso. The Main Theme continues unabated as we shift scenes to the blessing of the new theater. Toto is then entrusted with the job of projectionist with his mother’s approval and Father Adelfio’s blessing.

“Projection For Two” offers another score highlight. Fate reunites Toto and Alfredo when his wife brings him up to the projection room. As they warmly embrace, Morricone supports the tender moment with great lyricism using a passage by sumptuous strings full of sentimentality. At 1:23, as Alfredo caresses Toto’s face and counsels him to seek greater fortune elsewhere, we flash forward to Alfredo continuing the conversation with Toto, now Salvatore, a young man. Toto’s Theme carries the transition, but the theme, like Toto has matured and is now rendered less child-like and instead more forthrightly by horns nobile. “From American Sex Appeal to The First Fellini” reveals a montage of various movies Salvatore is projecting to the audience below. Times have changed and the audience can now see people kissing on screen. We open with a romantic rendering of the Main Theme, which was intended to support a romance with a woman lying naked on a bed. Instead Tornatore excised Morricone’s theme and infused a sultry blues piece, which spoke to the visual arousal of the young men viewing the film. At 1:27 Morricone’s Main Theme returns with a jazzy, swing like sensibility, which supports the gangster film being viewed. We close at 1:57 with a segue into a prancing rendering of the Main Theme by pizzicato strings.

“Love Theme” offers a sublime score highlight where Andrea Morricone’s timeless love theme is introduced. Salvatore has informed Elena that each night for a month he will stand outside her house in hope that she will open her bedroom shutters as a sign of her love. We see him waiting night after night to no avail. When December 31st ends he walks home forlorn as the town celebrates the New Year. Morricone supports his departure and heartache with stirring rendering of the Love Theme by solo flute doloroso. At 0:39 we change scenes to the projection room where we see Salvatore tearing up the calendar where her recorded his futile attempts for love. The flute has ascended in its register and carries his inconsolable heartache. As Elena enters, their eyes meet in love, and they embrace as the Love Theme blossoms on sumptuous strings romantico. As the reel ends and the crowd screams, our lovers ignore the world, lost in the rapture of a kiss. The closing reprise of their theme by solo violin is exquisite, and breathtaking. The confluence of film scene and music here was sublime. “For Elena” reveals that Elena has moved to Palermo to go to university. Salvatore misses her deeply and longs for her return. On a night where he is watching a movie in town outdoors, he lays back to look at the stars as it begins to rain. From out of nowhere comes Elena who kisses him passionately. He is overjoyed and the moment is supported beautifully by a stirring rendering of the Love Theme by string quartet.

After a stint in the military, Salvatore has lost touch with Elena and never again finds her, which wounds him deeply, a wound from which he never heals. In “Visit To The Cinema” Salvatore has returned home for Alfredo’s Funeral. Afterwards he visits the shuttered Cinema Paradiso, which is scheduled to be torn down in a few days. As he walks within the theater, Morricone bathes us in nostalgia with wonderful extended rendering of the Main Theme where piano and strings bring a quiver and a tear. We close the film with a score highlight. In “Love Theme For Nata” Salvatore plays the reel given to him by Alfredo. To his amazement it contains all the kissing scenes ordered excised by Father Adelfio. As he watches with bittersweet nostalgia, Morricone graces us with an exquisite extended rendering of the Main Theme, whose melody is transferred among the orchestral for a heart-warming performance. The End Credits featured Toto’s Theme and the cue is not included on the album.

“Four Interludes” offers a curious cue in that four scene interludes in the film are joined in a single cue. Interlude one opens with ambient woodwind and string phrases. Interlude two begins at 0:29 and emotes as a fragment of the Main Theme. Interlude three begins at 0:54 and features soothing strings, and Interlude four begins at 1:38 and offers short string phrases. Given their brevity, I did not choose to rewatch the film in its entirety to place them. For “Runaway, Search And Return” I was not able to discern a scene in the film for which this was intended, as such it must be attached to a scene which was dialed out of the film. We open energetically with a piano ostinato, which sows suspense as it slowly builds to crescendo, yet it never culminates, instead it transfers its energy at 1:29 to an impassioned rendering of the Main Theme, which closes on a solo violin. Lastly, “Cinema Paradiso” offers a bonus cue, which showcases the beauty of the Main Theme by string orchestra.

I would like to thank Enrico de Melis and DRG records for the new release of Ennio Morricone’s masterpiece, Cinema Paradiso. The audio quality is excellent and provides a wonderful listening experience. Morricone and his son Andrea excelled in providing Tornatore’s vision with the heart, bittersweet nostalgia and love it demanded. In scene after scene the confluence of music and film narrative was exemplary. Morricone understood that this tale explored a wounded man who had lost the love of his life and never recovered, moving unfulfilled from one girl to another, News that his beloved mentor Alfredo had died triggered a journey back to his youth in Giancaldo. In a stroke of genius, Morricone conceived a melody, which captured the film’s emotional core; indeed his Main Theme stands as one of the finest of his canon. For Salvatore, Toto’s Theme was brilliantly conceived and full captured his playful, defiant and irrepressible spirit. While Andrea’s contribution of the timeless Love Theme gave the film the heart and romance the story demanded. Folks, Morricone again demonstrate the power of music in enhancing and elevating a film. This score is one of the finest in his canon, and a gem of the Bronze Age, one that I highly recommend as essential for your collection.

Focus on: valzer giocoso，Small Ensemble, Solo Wind Instrument, Piano, Celesta, String Quartet, Alto Saxophone, Celesta, Flute, Strings, Violin, Solo Flute, Blues Works, Jazz, Gangster Movies, Pizzicato Strings, Flute Love Theme by Dolo Rosso for solo, woodwinds

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Titoli)

Iinfanzia e Maturita

Cinema in Fiamme (extended version)

Proiezione a Due

Quattro Interludi

Tema d'Amore

There have been literally dozens of versions of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet made for film and television over the years, ranging from Lawrence Olivier’s 1948 masterpiece, to Tony Richardson’s 1968 version based on his own London stage production, to Kenneth Branagh’s spectacularly lavish unabridged version released in 1995. In 1990 Italian director Franco Zeffirelli released his own version, which was made to appeal directly to Hollywood sensibilities through its casting of Mel Gibson in the title role. The story is, of course, a classic one, wherein the titular prince of Denmark plots revenge against his uncle Claudius, who murdered his brother the king – Hamlet’s father – with the help of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude. It’s a timeless story of violence, betrayal, retribution, and madness, and has a spectacular cast including Glenn Close, Alan Bates, Paul Scofield, Ian Holm, and Helena Bonham-Carter as the luckless Ophelia.

Franco Zeffirelli’s previous forays into Shakespeare, with The Taming of the Shrew in 1967 and Romeo and Juliet in 1968, resulted in spectacular scores by the great Nino Rota, but Zeffirelli needed to find a new musical voice for Hamlet as Rota had died in 1979. Perhaps inevitably, the composer chosen was the greatest Italian composer of his generation, Ennio Morricone, who was firmly a part of the film music mainstream at that point in his career, and was scoring mostly English language and Hollywood films. As far as I can tell this is the only Shakespeare adaptation Morricone ever scored, and it’s fascinating to hear his take on the bard.

By and large, Morricone approaches the story completely straightforwardly, concentrating on the drama and tragedy inherent in it all, without really offering any unusual takes or any of his occasionally idiosyncratic interpretations. It’s entirely orchestral, albeit with some occasional moments where a chorus is present, and it mostly focuses on the darkness of the story, which results in a score which can feel a little dour and depressing at times. It’s also not especially thematically strong, which is unusual for Morricone; there are recurring themes for Hamlet, for his doomed love Ophelia, and for the general concept of ‘madness,’ but none of them really assert themselves in the way that Morricone’s best themes do, instead seeming content to dwell in the murky gloom that characterizes most of the score.

Hamlet’s theme is a lament for strings, with an elegant but downcast melody that moves from violas to cellos, and is backed by a weary-sounding wash of violins. It captures the essence of the character perfectly – after all, he has just seen his father murdered by his uncle and mother, and is being counseled by his father’s ghost to commit murder himself, all while feigning madness and rejecting love – so from that point of view, it’s a success. Tonally, it reminds me a little of the elegant dirges Morricone wrote for films such as Casualties of War, and it has a little hint of Barber’s Adagio for Strings in the chord progressions. The second version later in the score switches the lead melodic performance from strings to oboe, and is in my opinion more appealing, despite the melancholy emotion of the piece overall. Later, its use in the pivotal “To Be or Not To Be” sequence underscores that most powerful of Shakespearean soliloquies with grace and sophistication.

Meanwhile, Ophelia’s theme offers a different melodic line, and slightly different instrumental colors, favoring soft brass, harps, and lightly darting woodwind textures to capture her initially more carefree, playful spirit. However, Morricone makes it clear that her story is one of tragedy too; when her caring advances towards Hamlet are rebuffed, when he tells her to ‘get thee to a nunnery,’ and when she eventually falls into a madness of her own following the death of her father Polonius at Hamlet’s hand, Morricone illustrates this with increasingly dark chord progressions, and moments featuring choral voices and, eventually, sadly lyrical woodwinds.

A lot of the rest of the score, when not featuring any of the two main themes prominently, tends to rely on elongated tones and shifting string chords, which create a mood and an atmosphere of appropriate tragedy and desolation, but don’t really last long in the memory. Anyone who has experienced any of Morricone’s more avant-garde works, especially the pieces he wrote with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, will hear callbacks to that style. It’s all quite minimalist and atmospheric. Having said that, some cues are notable for one reason or another. “The King Is Dead” is a brutally heraldic call-and-response piece for somber, echoing brass, accompanied by imposing church organs and hammered pianos; it somehow manages to combine an array of regal fanfares for Claudius with tragic funereal tones lamenting Hamlet’s father, a combination of ideas which should not work in tandem but somehow do. Later, “The Ghost” is a sinister piece full of dissonant string and woodwind writing, coupled with eerie sound effects, both synth-based and vocal, perfectly capturing both the spectre’s terrifying presence, and the vengeful message it passes on to Hamlet.

The middle of the score contains a trio of interesting renaissance pastiches for the scenes involving the Player King, his acting troupe, and the way in which Hamlet uses their performance to reveal Claudius’s guilt. Morricone uses instrumentation typical of the period (pipes, fiddles, tambourines, lyres, and what sounds like a hurdy-gurdy) but arranges them in unusual ways – “The Play,” for example, is quite twisted, hinting at Hamlet’s duplicity and the none-too-subtle message intended for Claudius. Perhaps the most straightforward piece is “The Banquet,” a lively and playful dance with a jolly melodic core.

The final fifteen minutes or so of the score, from “Hamlet’s Madness” through to the conclusive “The Vaults,” sees Morricone leaning fully into the overwhelming tragedy of the piece, scoring Hamlet’s descent into madness and death with stark writing for strings, agitated but also somehow graceful, and made all the more edgy through the use of increasingly shrill woodwinds and metallic percussion. This ‘madness motif’ continues through most of “Simulated Madness” and “Second Madness,” and perhaps reaches its peak in “The Closet ,” which underscores the scene where Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, and features Morricone writing at his most deathly, most anguished, and most dramatically profound. The forbidding twists and descending scales in Morricone’s writing here draws deeply from his Italian giallo background, to unnerving effect, while others may be reminded of the brooding orchestral tones Howard Shore brought to scores like The Silence of the Lambs.

Hamlet is a difficult score to summarize. It was written right in the middle of the period that contained so many of his most beloved works – The Mission, The Untouchables, Cinema Paradiso, Nostromo – but it really doesn’t sound like any of them. The melodic ideas are subtle and brooding, the emotions are much more skewed towards darkness and melancholy, and the whole thing has a profound seriousness to it, to the extent that many people will likely not feel the same sort of connection to it as they do to his other works of the period. Personally, it’s never been one of my Morricone favorites, but what I do like about it is how Morricone got deep into the underlying psychological issues that drive the story, and scored them rather than the more obvious elements that less sophisticated composers might focus on. Hamlet is a difficult score to love, and it’s certainly not one to play for fun, but it gives a strong insight into the intellectual side of Ennio Morricone, and for that it deserves a fair shot.

Focus on: Entirely orchestral, from viola to cello, accompanied by the weary tones of violins, Barber's Adagio for strings, oboes, Shakespearean soliloquies, soft brass, harp and light woodwind textures, sad lyrical woodwinds Instruments, somber, echoing brass, imposing church organ and hammer piano, dissonant strings and woodwinds, eerie sound effects, synthesizers and voices, typical instruments of the period (pipes, violins, tambourines , lyres, and things that sound like flutes), Italian giallo backgrounds, and the brooding orchestral tones that Howard Shore brought to scores like The Silence of the Lambs.

Hamlet (version 1)

The king is dead

Hamlet's madness

The vaults

Original Review by Craig Lysy

Renowned Italian director Sergio Leone had achieved what many believed to be the pinnacle of success in 1966, following completion of the last film of his famous Dollars trilogy, “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly”. Despite receiving universal accolades, he decided that he had said everything he wanted to say, and would not be returning to the Western genre. Hollywood studios, however, had other ideas, and wanted to capitalize on his talent and record of success. United Artists offered him opportunity to make a new Western, and his choice of the leading actors of the day including Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas or Rock Hudson. Leone declined, but when Paramount made a very generous financial offer, which also included an opportunity to work with Henry Fonda, Leone’s favorite actor, he agreed. Fulvio Morsella was tasked with producing and a budget of $5 million was provided. Leone hired Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento to assist him in crafting a screenplay. Later in the project Italian screenwriter Sergio Donati was brought in to assist with editing the film’s length as well as fine tuning the script’s dialogue. A fine cast was assembled, which included Henry Fonda as Frank, Claudia Cardinale as Jill McBain, Jason Robards as Manuel “Cheyenne” Gutiérrez, Charles Bronson as “Harmonica”, Gabriele Ferzetti as Mr. Morton, Paolo Stoppa as Sam, and Frank Wolff as Brett McBain.

The film is set in Flagstaff Arizona in the late 19th century and entwines two stories; a land battle regarding the region’s only fresh water source, which is needed for a planned railroad line route to the Pacific Ocean, and a brother avenging the death of his older brother at the hands of a ruthless cold-blooded killer. The film’s narrative is convoluted and only becomes apparent during the final act when the two-story narratives converge. The film was a modest commercial success earning a profit of $322,000 over its production costs of $5 million. Critical reception was initially mixed, receiving no Academy Award nominations. However, over the years the film has grown significantly in stature, with many regarding it as the finest Western ever made. In 2009 the film was honored and selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone constituted one of the finest collaborative partnerships in the history of Cinema and there was never any doubt that he would be asked to score the film. He readily accepted Leone’s offer and on his specific instructions composed the score based solely on the screenplay prior to the start of filming.[5] Such faith did Leone have in Morricone’s gift, that he would adapt his filming to support the individual compositions. Morricone was well familiar with Leone’s sensibilities in the Western genre. While American directors used the vast vistas as a backdrop to their story-telling, for Leone the vistas, rugged terrain and desert colors were as much an actor in the film’s narrative as the actors themselves. As such throughout the film Morricone speaks to this often with Leone adapting his filming and cinematography to achieve a masterful confluence to the already recorded score..............(More see here）

Looking at the city of Las Vegas today, it’s difficult to see past its opulent hotels, gourmet restaurants, popular shows, beautiful weather, and frivolous excess, and remember that this world center of entertainment has its origins in organized crime. Director Barry Levinson’s film Bugsy explores these origins, specifically looking at the life and death of New York gangster Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, who travels to Los Angeles in the early 1940s, gets involved with tough-talking Hollywood actress Virginia Hill, and makes a lot of friends and a lot of enemies in California’s criminal underworld, before he has the world-changing idea of building a luxury casino – the Flamingo – in the sun-baked Nevada town of Las Vegas as a way to launder money. The film is a fascinating look at the birth of one of the world’s most popular vacation spots; it stars Warren Beatty as Bugsy, Annette Bening as Hill, and features a supporting cast including Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley, and Elliott Gould. The film was also a critical success, picking up ten Academy Award nominations – including Best Picture – and eventually winning for Art Direction and Costume Design.

One of those other Academy Award nominations was for its score, written by the legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone. In the early 1990s Morricone was still writing one or two mainstream Hollywood scores per year, along with 30-40 European ones (that’s an exaggeration, of course, but he was certainly prolific!), and Bugsy was one of his most acclaimed works of the period. The score is built around two different love themes, which illustrate the two main loves of Siegel’s life. The first, “For Her, For Him,” is a representation of the love between Siegel and Hill, who despite their less-then-salubrious origins, shared a genuine and heartfelt romance. Morricone’s theme for them is a luscious, romantic, attractive melody for strings which has a flavor of several earlier scores – I got notable echoes of Once Upon a Time in America – but is played in counterpoint against some rather difficult and often somewhat odd-sounding woodwind harmonies which offer a slight tone of unease, as if the music knows what their fate will be.

The second theme is “Act of Faith,” and is a representation of Bugsy’s love of Las Vegas and the Flamingo Hotel itself – his monument to the world, and his obsession. The theme is anchored by a superb, haunting flugelhorn performance by soloist Francesco Santucci, and is a perfect encapsulation of classic Las Vegas itself – its origins are in that most wonderful type of lazy rat pack jazz, with a smoky, languid, bottom-of-a-whisky-glass sound, combined with Morricone’s own personal vibe. It’s unmistakably Ennio, but also fits snugly within the conventions of the mobster genre.

One of the other of these themes are repeated prominently in subsequent cues such as the dreamy “That Night In Las Vegas,” “United,” “Fly Away,” “Act of Faith,” and “At Great Expense.” “Bugsy’s Death” is probably the emotional high point of the score, offering a solemn elegy for the criminal who, to this day, remains a complicated and much-debated figure, but even this cue mostly keeps its emotions in check, never fully embracing a larger and more demonstrative scope.

Most of the rest of the score is equally subdued, comprising a series of low-key suspense and drama passages for undulating strings, accompanied by low-end piano figures, and frequent guest appearances from Morricone staples like recorders, harpsichords, and muted brass textures. I especially like the sense of menace that permeates cues like “Die Is Cast” and “On Sale,” the guitar sounds in “In Cuba” that veer from slightly ominous to lushly exotic, and the subtle sense of optimism and anticipation in the expressionistic “Desert Mirage”.

One cue – “Bugsy’s Arrest” – is a little more fulsome and is the closest the score comes to having any real action music; the staccato rhythmic ideas and pensive writing for piano, strings, muted brass, twittering woodwinds, harmonica, and Rosario Giuliani’s alto saxophone is a throwback to another Oscar-nominated gangster score, The Untouchables, and also has some echoes of some of his better European crime thriller works.

The album is rounded out by a quartet of period songs, including Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” made famous by Bing Crosby, two jazz standards performed by Jo Stafford, and the original 1942 Peggy Lee performance of “Why Don’t You Do Right” – I still can’t listen to this song without thinking of Jessica from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but it is still a terrific ‘woman’s blues’ song, in which a woman chastises her man for all his immoral and irresponsible ways.

As good as a great deal of Bugsy is, I still feel as though this was another score that was dragged along to an Oscar nomination on the coattails of an acclaimed film, at the expense of other better scores attached to less prestigious movies. Bugsy is a score that will appeal more to Morricone aficionados and completists than casual fans; the two main anchoring themes are lovely, but quite a lot of the meat of the score is subdued, textural, and rather dour in places, which suits the film but doesn’t really make a major impression out of context.

Focus on: Some weird woodwind harmonies, Francesco Santucci's flute, most wonderful type of lazy rat pack jazz, undulating strings, low end piano figures, recorder, harpsichord and soft brass textures, piano, strings , soft brass, chirping woodwinds, harmonica and Rosario Giuliani’s alto saxophone, Woman Blues

For her for him

Act of faith

Bugsy' s death

In cuba

The career of British director Roland Joffé is one of the oddest ones in recent cinema; after cutting his teeth making gritty UK TV dramas he gained international critical acclaim and Oscar recognition in 1984 for his film The Killing Fields, about the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s, and followed that with what is probably his most famous film, The Mission, in 1986. However, after making several consecutive flops in the late 1980s and 1990s, including things like Fat Man and Little Boy, The Scarlet Letter, and Goodbye Lover, he was eventually reduced to making low-budget ‘torture porn’ horror movies like Captivity, and now hasn’t made a major movie in more than 15 years. Possibly the last good movie Joffé made was this one: City of Joy, from 1992. It stars Patrick Swayze as an American doctor who travels to India in search of ‘spiritual enlightenment’ after a career crisis, and finds himself becoming deeply involved with helping people who live in the slums of Calcutta. The film co-stars Pauline Collins and Om Puri, and was a minor critical success, but is largely forgotten today.

Despite the director’s own spiraling career, one of the best legacies of Roland Joffé’s work is that his films inspired Ennio Morricone to write some of his greatest film music. Joffé and Morricone worked on four films together: The Mission, Fat Man and Little Boy, this one, and Vatel in 2000, and although The Mission is rightly lauded as one of the greatest scores in the history of cinema, the others should not be overlooked either. City of Joy could probably be accurately described as ‘The Mission in India’ – it’s a score that contains several lovely recurring themes, which are presented amid a whole host of traditional instrumental textures from the Indian subcontinent, including such familiar sounds as a sitar, tabla drums, a tambura, and a bansuri flute, along with a standard symphony orchestra and vocalists. It was recorded in both Italy and London and opens with the superb title theme “City of Joy,” an upbeat and rousing piece for orchestra and a staccato, barking chorus with a buoyant recurring melody backed by the unusual-sounding piccolo trumpet. This theme mostly represents Swayze’s character Max Lowe, and his genuinely good-hearted and altruistic nature, caring for the poor of Calcutta.

The second recurring theme, introduced in “The Family of the Poor,” is the theme for Om Puri’s character Hazari Pal, a farmer from a rural part of India who moves to Calcutta with his family in search of a better life but who, as a result of numerous hardships and instances of ill-fortune, ends up living in the slums, and eventually crosses paths with Lowe. This theme is gorgeous, heartbreakingly beautiful in places, but with a sense of inner conviction and fortitude that perfectly encapsulates Hazari’s nature, and his desire to overcome whatever obstacles life throws at him for the benefit of his family, with dignity and resolve. The theme is a showcase for woodwinds – the melody melts dreamily between a piccolo clarinet, a recorder, a flute, and back again – and will appeal to anyone who has ever loved Morricone’s lush, romantic side. It’s not as immediately rapturous as anything in The Mission -what is? – but it has its moments of delicate beauty.

The third recurring theme is the theme for Joan, the kind-hearted Irish nurse who runs the Calcutta clinic within which much of the film takes place, and it gets its most prominent performances in the two cues called “One Night, By Chance.” The theme is soft, intimate, but also a little melancholy, a beautiful duet for strings and breathy woodwinds with the merest hint of a piano, and which speaks to Joan’s character: solid, dependable, non-nonsense but driven by the need to care for others, and with a slightly wistful quality that acknowledges the fact that she cannot save everyone who comes to her ‘city of joy’ – from death, from disease, from poverty, from corruption. This tenderness combined with world-weary realism is excellent, and at times quite moving.

As is often the case with Morricone scores, these themes form the backbone of the score, and receive several reprises and variations as it progresses. For example, in “Hope,” the theme for Max is arranged for a small orchestra of sub-continental instruments alongside the standard ensemble and some rather unusual-sounding keyboards, in a Morricone-style approximation of Indian classical music. This blending of styles from vastly different ethnic backgrounds is fascinating, and the way Morricone allows his melody to remain central to the piece while adorning it with all the unusual tones and textures is very impressive. Elsewhere, in “Monsoon,” the theme is accompanied by sparkling, shimmering metallic textures that sound like the cleansing tones of raindrops, rippling and dancing into the Hooghly river. There are also two additional significant reprises of Hazari’s theme in two further cues, both also called “The Family of the Poor,” the first of which features a superb choral variation that is vintage Morricone.

One or two standalone pieces also impress. The second half of “For a Daughter’s Dowry” features an unexpectedly excellent performance by a solo boy soprano whose vocal timbre combines with idiosyncratic-sounding keyboard textures, while “The Birth” is just sublime, gentle and peaceful and with a lush, elegant sweep to the strings.

Then, on the flip side of the tenderness and beauty, the harshness and brutalism of life in Calcutta is conveyed with several extended sequences of suspense and action music, some of which gets quite dissonant. “Crack Down” eases you in slowly with some moody woodwind writing that actually reminds me a little of 1960s John Barry, but then later cues like “In the Labyrinth,” “A Surgeon in Despair,” the shrill and insistent “Godfather of the Bustee,” the sometimes quite intense “Calcutta,” and the 15-minute sequence comprising “The Worm Turns,” “The Labyrinth,” and “To Calcutta” are much darker, using nervous-sounding rattling percussion ideas, stark orchestral passages, and other dissonant textures, to convey some of the unsavory aspects of the story involving thieves, unscrupulous landlords, organized criminals, and more.

The final reprise of the main theme in “For Roland” is lovely, and provides a nice coda for what is one of Ennio Morricone’s most overlooked and underrated scores of the 1990s. Look, when you have the type of career that Ennio Morricone had, with so many iconic themes and all-time great scores under your belt, it’s inevitable that so much work ends up flying under the radar. This goes double for something like City of Joy, whose closeness in time and style and collaborative content to The Mission would make any score pale in comparison – and, yes, it does. There’s no getting around that fact. But despite that, City of Joy is still well worth exploring if you’re a fan of Morricone’s work; the main themes are genuinely lovely, some of the action and suspense music is interesting, and the film’s geographic setting gave the composer to explore some instruments and sounds that didn’t often feature in his work, and that alone makes it a score of note.

Focus on: sitar， tabla drums，tambura， bansuri flute, "City of Joy" can be accurately described as "The Missionof India", with a standard symphony orchestra and singers. Staccato, barking chorus, piccolo trumpet, woodwinds, piccolo, clarinet, recorder, flute, beautiful duet of strings and breathy woodwinds, small orchestra of subcontinental instruments, Indian classical music, moody woodwinds , John Barry in the 1960s,

City Of Joy

The Family Of The Poor

On Night , By Chance

To Roland