Italian composer Morricone scores honorary Oscar

By Chuck Crisafulli

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - There aren't many composers whose music is immediately identifiable after just a couple of whistled notes.

Such is the influence of Ennio Morricone that all it takes is a bit of whistling to evoke the Italian composer's masterful, genre-defying work on the spaghetti westerns he scored for Sergio Leone -- films such as 1967's "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."

Those oft-imitated, never-equaled scores would be sparkling highlights on any composer's list of credits, but in a career that spans almost 50 years and some 500 film and TV scores, Morricone's formidable talent has been applied to an astonishing breadth of work. He has created romantic, near-operatic scores for films such as 1990's "Cinema Paradiso" from Giuseppe Tornatore and Adrian Lyne's 1998 remake of "Lolita" and has imparted a stunning blend of epic grandeur and sublime melancholy to such films as Leone's 1984 crime epic "Once Upon a Time in America" and the landmark verite 1967 war film "The Battle of Algiers." And he's written brilliant, often counterintuitive scores to movies that range from the dark satire of 1998's "Bulworth" from Warren Beatty to the baroque horror films of Dario Argento, including the 1996 production "The Stendhal Syndrome."

This year, Morricone's work is being recognized, appreciated and celebrated in a number of significant ways. First and foremost, he is set to receive an honorary Academy Award at Sunday's ceremony. It will be Morricone's first Oscar, though he has been previously nominated five times, for his scores for 1978's "Days of Heaven" from Terrence Malick, 1986's "The Mission" from Roland Joffe, 1987's "The Untouchables" from Brian De Palma, 1991's "Bugsy" from Barry Levinson and, most recently, for Tornatore's "Malena" in 2001.

Morricone, who has conducted concert performances of his work in European venues over the years, recently made his long-anticipated American concert debut, leading the 100-piece Roma Sinfonietta orchestra and a full choir during a February concert at New York's Radio City Music Hall. He also led a performance of his September 11-inspired cantata "Voci dal Silencio" (Voices From the Silence) during a United Nations concert honoring incoming Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He has recently been feted with a retrospective of his films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and also is being paid tribute with the recent release of an album from Sony Classical, "We All Love Ennio Morricone," which features performances from such varied artists as Renee Fleming, Herbie Hancock, Bruce Springsteen and Metallica (the metal band isn't included simply as a novelty -- the members are big enough fans that they use Morricone's "The Ecstasy of Gold" from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" as intro music at their concerts).

The title of that album does not appear to be an overstatement. While Morricone's music encompasses a great stylistic range and the movies he has scored represent virtually every genre of film, one constant throughout his career has been the respect and esteem of both filmmakers with whom he has worked and filmmakers who appreciate the artistry he brings to a director's creative vision.

"My favorite Morricone scores are 'Once Upon a Time in the West' (for the 1969 film of the same name), 'Once Upon a Time in America' and 'The Mission,'" Steven Spielberg says. "What I really like about him is he's not afraid of a pretty melody."

"He reinvented movie music," Martin Scorsese adds. "He was very different from the classic film composers out of Hollywood at the time -- (Jerry) Goldsmith, (Elmer) Bernstein, (Bernard) Herrmann. Morricone's sound was new and bold, a cross between European and American music in the same way that 'A Fistful of Dollars,' which Morricone scored, tapped into the Japanese filmmaking sensibility as a remake of (Akira) Kurosawa's (1961 film) 'Yojimbo.'"