Record of the day: Ennio Morricone, “Here’s to you…”

Ennio Morricone, “Here’s to you…” (Cd DualDisc 82876809552)

After making him wait for years by rewarding musicians who weren’t worth much compared to him, the Americans decided to award an Oscar for lifetime achievement to Ennio Morricone. Whoever takes it hard wins, it would be appropriate to say, given that the composer should have received this recognition a long time ago; in any case, the event brought a veritable avalanche of record reissues and new recordings to the shops to worthily celebrate the award ceremony.

Among these, the most successful is undoubtedly this anthology recorded live and published on DualDisc (i.e. with one CD side and the other on DVD where you can follow an interview with Morricone and listen to other live performances). Capturing moments taken from concerts in London, Verona, Rome, Tokyo and Budapest which saw Morricone himself leading the Roma Sinfonietta with the participation of the excellent soprano Susanna Rigacci, this album manages to provide a more than acceptable overview of the great successes achieved by Morricone in his forty-year career, although the most glaring absence for me is that of what I consider to be his best work, “Una pure formalità”, made for Giuseppe Tornatore’s film (a magnificent score of which, who knows why, no one ever speaks).

It is useless to dwell once again on the beauty of the themes, the orchestral writing technique, the contrapuntal skill that the composer learned from the school of Goffredo Petrassi; it is better to underline how these compositions resist time in a way that is not normally the prerogative of film music, a notoriously “biodegradable” genre.

The title sequence is familiar, from “Once Upon a Time in America” ​​to “Mission”, through “The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean”, “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso”, “The Untouchables”, “Giù la testa” , “Investigation into a citizen above suspicion”, “Sacco and Vanzetti” and others; the only pages that are rarely listened to are two themes taken from “Malèna” by Tornatore, a little if you consider the over 400 soundtracks written by Morricone (many of which are still to be rediscovered). The audience happily recognizes the pages they have listened to who knows how many times on the big screen, and the orchestra plays with generosity and warmth under the author’s baton.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical topics.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: A record for every day of the year” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.