APOLLO'S ACOUSTICS THWART MOVIE MASTER
"A Morricone score," announced Jonathan Ross, heralding the entrance of the distinguished Italian movie composer, "can turn a good film into a great one and a great film into an absolute masterpiece."
Who would argue? Over five decades Morricone has provided extraordinary, innovative soundtracks to more than 400 films of every stripe, most famously the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone.
Audacious in their instrumentation (check out that tortured clarinet in The Good the Bad and the Ugly theme), his scores combine easy melody with outrageous texture. Old film buffs, hip young DJs (Morricone is a goldmine for samples) and the odd Mariachi flocked to pay their respects.
But the ghastly acoustics of the Apollo turned what could have been a masterful concert into one that was merely good. The subtleties of the Roma Sinfonietta and the always game Crouch End Festival Chorus were lost.
The sound in the stalls became a Mexican stand-off between the actual instruments on stage, the noise of them screeching through the speakers and the echo off the back wall.
Morricone, a brisk and measured conductor, had a slight air of unease - but his best work stood strong. Innovative late Sixties scores, such as the Fender bass-led H2S and Metti Una Sera a Cena shone, while The Ecstasy of Gold (from The Good the Bad and the Ugly), reprised in an encore, swept all away. Brass stirred, drums galloped and soprano Susanna Rigacci wailed and stomped.
Yee-hah! - or the Italian equivalent.
