This concert celebrated Ennio Morricone's 75th birthday, an age at which the maestro evidently feels it appropriate to consider posterity. The performance was prefaced by a video in which Morricone reflected on nearly 60 years in music, putting ignorant film directors firmly in their place and making a distinction between the "applied" music he writes for movies and the "absolute" music designed for the concert hall.
The concert drew exclusively from his catalogue of film music, but Morricone avoided cranking out a string of greatest hits. The three-hour show was organised under several headings, from Life and Legend (including The Untouchables, Once Upon a Time in America and Cinema Paradiso) to the unwieldy-sounding The Modernity of Myth in Sergio Leone's Cinema, then on into Social Cinema, and Tragic, Epic and Lyrical Cinema. Morricone had fashioned each portion into a self-contained suite, making the music work harder to compensate for the absence of moving pictures, and he drew fine nuances of tone and dynamics from the Rome Sinfonietta and the Crouch End Festival Chorus.
Morricone's trademarks are his tumultuous choral and orchestral climaxes, and his gift for eloquent, plaintive themes. The selections from The Mission that formed the show's climax showcased both, with choir and orchestra thundering to a full-tilt crescendo over a cannonade of percussion. Battle of Algiers found the orchestra marching ominously to a crackling military drumbeat and staccato fanfares of brass, while Queimada-Abolisson closed the Social Cinema sequence with exhilarating antiphonal passages from the choir over a pounding, almost tribal rhythm.
From Morricone's Sergio Leone collaborations, the coyote-howl motif from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly rivals the James Bond Theme for instant recognisability, while his monumental score for Once Upon a Time in the West alone would guarantee him immortality. He was miserly with the latter, but that's a good excuse to watch the film again.
