Il Maestro in America

"If Morricone has a signature theme, of all the great music he has created over the past 45 years, it is surely this amazing orchestral invention, combining haunting melodic beauty, savage lust and animal desperation. No one can listen to this and not picture Eli Wallach as Tuco, running among the crosses marking the graves of thousands of war dead, breathlessly seeking the one that marks the hiding place of a treasure beyond imagining.

That show-stopping sequence in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly astonishes everyone who sees that movie for the first time - or for the 31st. A "privileged moment" if ever there was one, it dares to stop the film's narrative for more than three minutes of blood-churning, temperature-raising pure style - a moment that, in case anyone hadn't noticed yet, announced the absolute arrival of both Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone. It is the defining moment of that film, and the first of several defining moments of Morricone's career. And as I watched and listened, I couldn't help thinking how far we have come from 1967, when so many critics considered The Good, the Bad and the Ugly grindhouse grunge from an upstart Italian who knew nothing about that uniquely American genre, the Western; and even those few who were sensitive enough to be struck by the music and the stylistic bravura still wondered why it was wasted on genre trash. Today, here we are, dressed up in our Saturday night finest, to hear the composer perform that music in a hallowed American concert venue. And rightly so. Morricone and his music always deserved this. It just took close to half a century for most people to recognize it..."