“Morricone Conducts Morricone”
Ennio Morricone in Performance on CUNY-TV
Sunday, February 11 at 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM
Italian film composer Ennio Morricone, who has been gracing films in Italy, Hollywood and around the world with his distinctive scores since 1960, will be receiving an Honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards Ceremony on Sunday February 25. To honor this occasion, CUNY-TV will present a special showing of “Morricone Conducts Morricone,” a 99-minute concert taped in Munich in 2004. He conducts the Munich Radio Orchestra and Choir in performance that features excerpts from 18 of his scores, including the following favorites:
“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”
“Once Upon a Time in the West”
“Once Upon a Time in America”
“A Fistful of Dynamite”
“Cinema Paradiso”
“The Mission”
“Casualties of War”
“Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion”
“The Working Class Goes to Heaven”
Soprano Susanna Rigacci performs the soaring vocal part of the sweeping theme from “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Other soloists include Ulrich Herkenhoff on panpipes, Henry Raudales on violin, Norbert Merkl on viola and Gilda Butta on piano.
Morricone's scores are notable for their imaginative approach to instrumentation and sound, using all sorts of eclectic instruments and sources of sound, from human vocals, high-pitched brass solos and electronic instruments to chimes, bells, whistles, jew's harp, and a wide range of percussive sounds. He is a classically trained musician whose music is lyrical and romantic in one film-with full symphonic orchestration, and harsh and dissonant in another, with jangling electronic sounds and low, ominous chords. He can be jaunty and cheery-with passages of great wit-in one scene, dark and chilling in another, all depending on the needs of the images.
Morricone came to fame initially through his scores for the films of Sergio Leone, whose Italian western trilogy about the “Man with No Name” (“A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) put the “spaghetti western” on the world map in 1967 and made an international star out of Clint Eastwood. He went on to score all of Leone's subsequent films (“Once Upon a Time in the West,” “A Fistful of Dynamite,” and “Once Upon a Time in America”), as well as dozens of other westerns of the era. Many other prominent Italian directors sought out Morricone, including Bernardo Bertolucci (“1900”), Marco Bellocchio (“Fist in His Pocket”), Pier Paolo Pasolini (“The Hawks and the Sparrows”), Elio Petri (“Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion”), Dario Argento (“Bird with the Crystal Plumage”), Edouard Molinaro (“La Cage aux Folles”), Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (“The Meadow”), and Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”), among many others.
Hollywood came calling early on when Eastwood urged Don Siegel to use Morricone for Eastwood's second Hollywood western, “Two Mules for Sister Sara.” Since then, such directors as Brian de Palma (“The Untouchables”), Sam Fuller (“White Dog”), John Carpenter (“The Thing”), Roland Joffe (“The Mission”), Barry Levinson (“Bugsy”), Wolfgang Petersen (“In the Line of Fire”), and Warren Beatty (“Bulworth”) have all hired Morricone.
The program will be shown on Sunday, February 11, 2007 on CUNY-TV/Channel 75 at 1:00 PM, with an encore showing at 3:00 PM.
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