Il Maestro in America.

The anticipation was practically unbearable. People from all over the country had bought tickets, waited months, and stood in line on a damp, bitter-cold New York evening, for this one event. And to call it an "event" is not to belittle its significance as a concert. It was both: We wanted to hear the music live, and we also wanted desperately to get an in-person look at the man himself, the composer who, for so many of us, is the author of the soundtrack score to our lives.

The 100 choir members had filed in and taken their seats, the 100-piece orchestra was already in place, the concertmaster had appeared and tuned them up, and nothing remained but for the concert to begin.

After a long and awkward pause, an unassuming little man in tails, a load of sheet music under his arm, entered from stage right and strode across the brightly-lit stage. The audience burst into applause. The accolade grew as he mounted the podium and placed the sheet music onto the conductor's lectern, then died a fast death as he stepped back off the podium and briskly exited. The audience shivered into nervous, then heartfelt, self-mocking laughter as they realized they'd been applauding the wrong guy - someone on the order of Melville's sub-sub-librarian instead of the titan they'd been waiting for.

Well, we'd got that off our chests, so by the time Ennio Morricone [site] lui stesso walked out to take the podium, the atmosphere had been thoroughly de-mysticized and informalized. The applause was more rousing than ever, of course; but everyone was just so much more comfortable - not the least, I suspect, Maestro Morricone himself.

There was no mistaking him - the balding pate, wisps of silver and gold hair, furrowed brow, Coke-bottle glasses - and it was a delight that he was, indeed, so informal: no arrogance or sense of importance about his walk or stance, just a man getting on with his work, gracious, spry for his 78 years, and a little befuddled at all these people going crazy over him.

The concert was engineered to be a short one, without intermission, consisting of six medleys comprising works that someone - most likely the Maestro himself - considered to be related. As a kind of prologue, the first set was headed by The Untouchables - not one of the more melodic sections from that score, but a pulsing, insistent, occasionally discordant set-piece of the kind Morricone has so frequently used to define the determination of implacable, and sometimes doomed, characters in scenes of action and mounting suspense.

From this, a graceful segue (the first of many in an evening built upon medleys) into the heart-aching "Deborah's Theme" from Once upon a Time in America, followed by "Poverty" and the main title from the same film, and then the theme from a lesser-known film, Giuseppe Tornatore's La Leggenda del pianista sull'oceano, or The Legend of 1900, delivered with powerful passion.

The second set featured the pianist Gilda Buttà in a warm rendering of the themes for Nuovo Cinema Paradiso and Maléna. But the third set was clearly the most eagerly anticipated. Somewhat pretentiously titled "The Modernity of Myth in Sergio Leone's Cinema," it consisted of the main themes from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once upon a Time in the West and Duck, You Sucker (here billed under its alternate title A Fistful of Dynamite), culminating in a barn-burning, all-stops-out performance of L'estasi dell'oro from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. 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.

Even in recent years, Morricone's music has been the subject of musings along the lines of "What a pity such great music was wasted on so many bad movies." Of course, Morricone scored many truly great movies, including several whose greatness took some people a few years to recognize; but even the poorest of the Italian popular-genre films that were the subject of most of his scores can never be fairly called "bad movies" for one reason: They were scored by Morricone, and that alone, over time, has proved to be enough to make them worthy.

The concert program proudly proclaimed: "The orchestrations are the same as the original soundtracks composed by Ennio Morricone." Not true. Several of the pieces - including the two from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - had significant orchestral variations from the versions that were used in the soundtracks of the films themselves. Not a problem, since the concert versions were equally thrilling; but one wonders why they went to the trouble of making a claim that wasn't true. Most notably, the counter-theme to the main title from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was played by brass rather than by "surf" guitar, even though the orchestra assembled for this concert included two electric guitars.

The orchestra was joined by soprano Susanna Rigacci for those pieces calling for Morricone's famous, innovative use of voice without words. Ms Rigacci rose to the occasion, and was able to provide the necessary frisson, despite having a much wider vibrato than Edda dell'Orso, and occasionally resorting to glissandi where Edda did not. But I doubt if Ms Rigacci or anyone else (Edda included) could replicate today what Edda did in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker, Once upon a Time America, La Califfa, Nostromo and so many other film scores. Together, Edda and Ennio created a unique, original sound that became a trademark for both of them and for an entire style of cinematic music.

But for all its rousing impact and thematic provocation, and despite its popularity, L'estasi dell'oro was not the big hit of the evening. Nor was "In Earth as in Heaven," the chorus from The Mission that closed the concert. That honor went to the jaw-dropping "Abolicao" (identified in the program as "Abolisson") from Gillo Pontecorvo's Queimada (Burn!) - a little-known and less-seen film almost certainly unknown to most of the audience, who were thrilled to bursting by this wonderful piece of orchestral and choral pyrotechnics. So powerful is this work that no one would leave the theater until they heard it a second time - which they did.

"Abolicao" was part of a two-piece medley labeled "Social Cinema," in which it was preceded by the main theme from Vittime di Guerra, which only the Italian-speaking (apparently most of the audience, to judge by the lobby conversation after the concert) were likely to recognize as Brian De Palma's Casualties of War.

A grab-bag medley entitled "Scattered Sheets" collated themes from comparatively little-known films: H2 S, The Sicilian Clan, Metti una sera a cena (One Night at Dinner) and Maddalena. The final set comprised the haunting "Gabriel's Oboe," the title theme, and "In Earth as in Heaven" from Roland Joffé's The Mission - a masterful performance of a masterpiece of film scoring.

The entire concert lasted less than the running time of an average CD - probably no coincidence, although the rumor is that the concert was recorded on video and will be released on DVD.

There was a long standing ovation before the Maestro - seemingly reluctantly - returned for an encore. No encore had been planned, so the audience was treated to a second performance of L'estasi dell'oro. This performance was better than the first one, partly because Ms Ragacci seemed more relaxed and comfortable, and handled those high notes more gracefully. But it wasn't enough. The applause continued, and the audience was rewarded with a reprise of Maléna. When the second encore proved to be a slow piece, it was unthinkable that there would not be a third, and the applause continued. Il Maestro returned, with a shrug, and played again what everyone was waiting for, the "Abolicao" from Queimada. And nothing could have ended the concert more appropriately or thrillingly.

After that, he was really finished, and he let us know that by gathering up all the sheet music himself, tucking it under his arm, and leaving the stage for good. And this time the audience cheered for the right guy.

Posted by dwhudson at February 12, 2007 12:44 PM