In a surprisingly erudite introduction, Jonathan Ross hailed Ennio Morricone as "the greatest composer of film music in the history of cinema". To a tumultuous round of applause, "the maestro" strode briskly to the conductor’s podium in front of the Roma Sinfonietta. The orchestra had flown in for two shows at the Apollo, a venue more usually associated with rock concerts, but now described, in terms commensurate with the occasion, as "one of London’s most magnificent Art Deco movie palaces".
It is only five years since the Italian composer, 78, gave the first British concert performance of his career. His visits remain rare and an air of expectation, worthy of a scene in one of the hundreds of films he has scored, hung over the hall as he called the orchestra to order. The strings picked out the stately melody of Romanzo, the first of a selection of pieces from his soundtrack to Novecento, the 1976 movie directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Like many of Morricone’s compositions, the theme was grand and mellifluous, and notably conventional both in its lush instrumentation and gradual development. Not for the maestro the jarring harmonies, sudden rhythmic quirks and other stock-in-trade devices for signposting moments of dramatic tension that crop up in many lesser movie soundtracks.
And yet the one area of his huge repertoire in which he departed from the orchestral norm was also the most keenly awaited. A selection of themes from the "spaghetti" westerns brought a range of more atmospheric instrumentation and effects into play. As the famous whistling motif of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly swirled round the hall, tubular bells clanged like the peal from a distant church tower, an electric guitar twanged, and the bows of the violinists and cellists bounced across their strings like horses galloping across the desert sands. With the full force of the Crouch End Festival Chorus now coming into play, led with fierce intensity by the Boadicca-like soprano Susanna Rigacci, the themes from A Fistful of Dynamite and The Ecstasy of Gold brought the show to a spectacularly rousing, if somewhat premature, climax.
There was still a beautifully rendered Gabriel’s Oboe and other pieces from The Mission to come, and then a sequence of encores as the maestro "reluctantly" returned, again and again... and again in response to the improbably sustained ovation. Downing his baton, he walked into the sunset at last.
