Post by erik on Jan 23, 2021 18:43:22 GMT -5
The late, great Italian film composer Ennio Morricone gets the nod in this week's Classical Works Spotlight with what is arguably his greatest film score, to a great 1969 sagebrush epic directed by his close friend Sergio Leone.
Ennio Morricone: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
There isn’t too much doubt that Ennio Morricone is the one Italian composer most admired by Hollywood film fans, and indeed by film fans all over the world. That reputation really began in 1964, when up-and-coming director Sergio Leone tapped Morricone to score his thoroughly bizarre Western opus A Fistful Of Dollars, which starred a then-largely-unknown (save for TV’s Rawhide) American actor named Clint Eastwood. That film, however, turned out to be a huge box office success in Europe; and it was followed by two more films, 1965’s For A Few Dollars More, and 1966’s The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. All three films saw their American releases in 1967, and all were monumental successes, the pinnacle of what came to be known as the wacky and violent Spaghetti Western. Leone had tired of the genre by 1967; but when Paramount Pictures offered him $5 million to do another Western, he went with the notion, and created what was indisputably one of the great Western epics of all time, Once Upon A Time In The West. Essentially Leone’s homage to, and compendium of, the West and the Western film genre, from the silent films of the late 1910’s all the way up to the 1960’s, the film’s primary focus was on a widower (Claudia Cardinale) out to save her land, with the help of two enigmatic drifters (Charles Bronson; Jason Robards), from a ruthless railroad baron (Gebrielle Ferzetti). At a running time of two hours and forty five minutes, Once Upon A Time In The West is very much an epic “horse opera”, with the added twist of having Henry Fonda, normally an actor associated with the Western in a good way, here playing a cold-blooded, corporate gunman (one of the great villain roles in all of cinema). Morricone, interestingly, composed and conducted the score for the film before Leone even exposed so much as a single frame of film, so that he could direct his actor’s moves and the scenery (some of it shot in Spain, but a fair amount also shot in world-famous Monument Valley in Arizona and Utah) to the music. Due to the length and the admittedly slow pace, and the fact that there was far less violence in it than Leone’s previous films, Once Upon A Time In The West wasn’t initially either a critical or a commercial hit when it reached American cinemas in late May 1969. Time and repeated viewings, however, resulted in the film finally being appreciated by film fans from the mid-1980s onwards; and Morricone’s lush score, with its leitmotifs for its major characters, was deemed one of the most important of all movie scores by the American Film Institute in 2005. Morricone passed away in Rome on July 6, 2020 at the age of 91.
Soprano Vocal: EDDA DELL’ORSO
Harmonica: FRANCO DE GEMINI
Whistler: ALESSANDRO ALESSANDRONI
Modern Singers Of Alessandroni
Rome Studio Symphony Orchestra/ENNIO MORRICONE (RCA/BMG)
Ennio Morricone: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
There isn’t too much doubt that Ennio Morricone is the one Italian composer most admired by Hollywood film fans, and indeed by film fans all over the world. That reputation really began in 1964, when up-and-coming director Sergio Leone tapped Morricone to score his thoroughly bizarre Western opus A Fistful Of Dollars, which starred a then-largely-unknown (save for TV’s Rawhide) American actor named Clint Eastwood. That film, however, turned out to be a huge box office success in Europe; and it was followed by two more films, 1965’s For A Few Dollars More, and 1966’s The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. All three films saw their American releases in 1967, and all were monumental successes, the pinnacle of what came to be known as the wacky and violent Spaghetti Western. Leone had tired of the genre by 1967; but when Paramount Pictures offered him $5 million to do another Western, he went with the notion, and created what was indisputably one of the great Western epics of all time, Once Upon A Time In The West. Essentially Leone’s homage to, and compendium of, the West and the Western film genre, from the silent films of the late 1910’s all the way up to the 1960’s, the film’s primary focus was on a widower (Claudia Cardinale) out to save her land, with the help of two enigmatic drifters (Charles Bronson; Jason Robards), from a ruthless railroad baron (Gebrielle Ferzetti). At a running time of two hours and forty five minutes, Once Upon A Time In The West is very much an epic “horse opera”, with the added twist of having Henry Fonda, normally an actor associated with the Western in a good way, here playing a cold-blooded, corporate gunman (one of the great villain roles in all of cinema). Morricone, interestingly, composed and conducted the score for the film before Leone even exposed so much as a single frame of film, so that he could direct his actor’s moves and the scenery (some of it shot in Spain, but a fair amount also shot in world-famous Monument Valley in Arizona and Utah) to the music. Due to the length and the admittedly slow pace, and the fact that there was far less violence in it than Leone’s previous films, Once Upon A Time In The West wasn’t initially either a critical or a commercial hit when it reached American cinemas in late May 1969. Time and repeated viewings, however, resulted in the film finally being appreciated by film fans from the mid-1980s onwards; and Morricone’s lush score, with its leitmotifs for its major characters, was deemed one of the most important of all movie scores by the American Film Institute in 2005. Morricone passed away in Rome on July 6, 2020 at the age of 91.
Soprano Vocal: EDDA DELL’ORSO
Harmonica: FRANCO DE GEMINI
Whistler: ALESSANDRO ALESSANDRONI
Modern Singers Of Alessandroni
Rome Studio Symphony Orchestra/ENNIO MORRICONE (RCA/BMG)