* Sony Classical releases “Ennio Morricone conducts Morricone –
His Greatest Hits”, celebrating Morricone’s 60 years of music
making
* The album features his most popular movie themes, selected,
conducted and produced by Morricone himself
* It contains music from films including "Once Upon a Time in the
West", "Cinema Paradiso", "The Good The Bad And The Ugly", "The
Mission"
* In 2016 and 2017 Morricone will present parts of this
repertoire internationally on his "The 60 Years of Music Tour"
"To conduct my music for the cinema with the Orchestra and Choir
of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, with the singers Gemma
Bertagnolli, Dulce Pontes, and Angelo Branduardi, was for me an
unforgettable experience. I am grateful to Sony Classical for
giving audiences around the world, and myself, this important
document of my career." (Ennio Morricone)
The jury may still be out, but one thing is already certain –
when all the votes are tallied, Ennio Morricone will be counted
as one of the most important composers of the twentieth century.
That is all the more remarkable, since very few composers,
particularly of foreign birth, have yet to achieve this status in
on art form that, like the movies that spawned it, is purely a
phenomenon of the century we are on the verge of leaving behind.
Recorded in Rome in 1998, this album came about as the result of
a happy encounter. “Some years ago, Bruno Cagli, the
superintendent of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia had asked me if
I would do a concert of my film music at the Accademia,” the
composer recalled recently. “I agreed, provided that I’d be
allowed to use their fine musicians.” With so many themes to
choose from, final selection proved a daunting task. As Morricone
explains, “I finally zeroed in on the themes that I thought the
public loved the best.” This album proves a fine tribute to one
of the best film composers of the twentieth century.
Morricone was born in Rome in 1928 into a musical family. His
her, a trumpet player, had acquired a solid reputation in
musical circles as a performer who was equally at ease in jazz,
opera and film music. At the age of six, young Ennio devoted
himself to music and at seven studied composition; at ten, he
enrolled at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, graduating in 1956.
During his formative years, Morricone showed little interest in
film music, but his professional interest was piqued, in 1954,
after he attended a screening of The Rabe, scored by Alfred
Newman. In 1959, he received his first full scoring assignment
when director Luciano Salce asked him to write the music for the
film Il Federale (The Federal Soldier). Over the next couple of
years, Morricone scored a dozen movies, including Duello nel
Texas (fight at Red Sands) in 1963, his first Western, and
Malamondo, in 1964, which attracted international attention to
his budding talent.
By the early 1960s the Western had become all but extinct in
Hollywood. In Europe, meanwhile, the film was enjoying tremendous
popularity, most notably in Germany, where homegrown films, many
of them starring expatriate American actors, took stories bused
in the Old West and gave them a continental spin. What neither
Sergio Leone nor Ennio Morricone had anticipated was that their
Fistful of Dollars relationship would have such amazing results
from the start. Not only did it set the tone for the more than
thirty-five Westerns Morricone scored subsequently, it introduced
a style that, over the years, became widely admired and imitated.
With more than three hundred scores to his credit, in recent
years Morricone has taken to writing more selectively for the
screen. He may appear frequently in concert; but it is largely to
perform selections from his most famous scores, as this
demonstrates.