Il Maestro

I’ve written about Ennio Morricone before, but I think that this profile in the Times is really worth a read. Even though he’s mostly known for his film scores, he’s really an old-school Italian composer, albeit one who’s staggering versatile.

My sister and I were watching For A Few Dollars More on TV once (one of the blessings of thousand-channel digital cable is that there’s always a Clint Eastwood movie playing somewhere), and she commented that the music sounded like Verdi was hired to write the score.

To be fair, composers have to solve many of the same problems when writing an opera and writing a film score (if you do it right): both opera and film scores require that the composer deal with leitmotifs and use music to underscore emotion and underscore character motivation (when you consider that, it’s not surprising at all that this scene is considered by many to be one of the all-time great screen kisses).

What this all boils down to is that the Maestro is giving his first American concert next week at Radio City Music Hall, which is, when you think about it, a rather appropriate venue.

(For those of you playing at home, I’m finally out of the “B”s and now I’m up to “Chewing Gum”)