ENNIO MORRICONE

Baaria Silva Screen

Ennio Morricone’s new score

for Giuseppe Tornatore’s autobiographical Baaria is one of the veteran composer’s finest. Revisiting the earlier experiments of his five-decade- long career, particularly the post-serial atonalism of his spaghetti western Dollars trilogy, Morricone succeeds in creating an elegiac score that

is at once epic and lyrical. He combines Sicilian folk idioms and neo-romantic motifs with long melodic lines, dynamic orchestration and idiosyncratic instrumental and vocal colours to achieve an exquisite complexity of mood and feeling, which is more dramatic than nostalgic. Baaria is that genuinely rare delight: a classic film score by a master composer. See silvascreen.co.uk

JOCELYN CLARKE

Download tracks: Sinfonia per Baaria, Il corpo e la terra

yyy Film reviewed, page 13