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Okay, I gotta say I was never a big Morricone fan. I like a couple of things of his, but was pretty much "eh" with other stuff. I did go to the concert though because I always wanted to attend a filmscore concert and I knew he'd most likely have some of his best work performed.
Just got back.
Oh. My. God. Consider me converted. It was absolutely beautiful. I actually steared tearing when Once Upon a Time in America was playing. Georgous.
I will go on more tomorrow, but I'm really jazzed rightr now. Three encores! It was beautiful!
Oh, I overheard a young couple saying they had met on a blind date and this was the date. Damn, that's classy and they both had a great time. Mattrhew Sheridan, if you post on here, I congratulate you. She's very pretty and I wish you luck (I was the bald dude behind you in the first mezzanine).
Going to be now. Much to process. Anyone else who went, please relate your experience here.
Nite.
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Posted: |
Feb 4, 2007 - 4:36 AM
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By: |
Rexor
(Member)
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Okay, I gotta say I was never a big Morricone fan. I like a couple of things of his, but was pretty much "eh" with other stuff. I did go to the concert though because I always wanted to attend a film score concert and I knew he'd most likely have some of his best work performed.
Yeah, I'm not a big Morricone fan either (some of his stuff is too repetitive and I don't like most of his "suspense" stuff), but I couldn't pass up this opportunity. I'm not sure if most of the crowd was Morricone addicts either; They started clapping for the wrong guy.  D (My glasses aren't what they used to be... )
Anyone else who went, please relate your experience here.
I got there a little early to take in the atmosphere. I hadn't ate dinner so I got a bagel and a banana from the nearby Au Bou Pan before the concert began. I stood outside of Radio City Music Hall wharfing down food while listening to Conan the Barbarian. I had this "I can't believe there are other film music fans" feeling...
Though I do wish that there were some more film music fans in he theater. I was a little disappointed that every seat wasn't filled, but it was good to have 2 empty seats next to my aisle seat location. The lucky guy directly behind me had 4 empty seats next to him! I thought the concert was good. I didn't check the play-list, so I was surprised when they started playing Abolicao from Quiemada. That's one of my favorite Morricone scores. The extra (louder) orchestra accompaniment was good, but the choir was a little bit lacking...
Of course, the GBU selections were excellent. Ecstasy of Gold always puts me in a mood of ecstasy. That was brilliant. The Mission was good too, but I'm afraid that I've grown a little to attached to the soundtrack and Silva's recording of "On Earth as it is in Heaven." I actually thought that they played a cue (encore?) from City of Joy, but somethings I get these two scores confused.
I could have stayed there all-night with Morricone, the orchestra, and his blue book. Just imagine people shouting out cues, from his 500 or so scores, for the orchestra to play. The concert went by VERY FAST. At first, when the concert had ended I thought it was only the Intermission. 
-Rex
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It was a night that I'd waited 30 years for and I wasn't disappointed. If you pick up the ARENA Concert DVD, you'll have a fairly accurate rendition of the NYC concert. The venue was not sold out, but pretty close...perhaps 85-90% full ? Morricone had little rapport with the audience (as is typical for him) but the audience showered their love upon him (with my shouting in Italian from the first row front mezzanine leading the way). We were given 3 encores ("The Ecstasy of Gold," "Casualties of War" (orchestral only) and "Abolicao" from BURN) and the orchestra and chorus sounded great throughout the show. Afterwards, it was great meeting up with Ned Boyle, Henry Stanny, Addie Smith, Pat Cleary, Bill Reynolds, Marshall, etal for some drinks. It's been a long long time since I was able to share my enthusiasm for the Maestro with fellow fans and it was a wonderful conclusion to a memorable evening. I literally died and went to heaven
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(with my shouting in Italian from the first row front mezzanine leading the way).
That was you? Glasses and dark hair. Nice spotting you. I was to your left by the wall, second row. The guy behind me shouted "Viva Ennio!" also.
No, it wasn't sold out, but it was still a very large turnout and it really helped justify my passion for filmscores (as if it needed justification).
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No giallo stuff...most oddball slections were the Abolicao from BURN , MADDALENA and the 2 selections from METTI UNA SERA A CENA. The Spaghetti western material was limited to 4 tracks only...2 from THE GOOD THE BAD & THE UGLY, 1 from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and 1 from A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE. I did miss A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE very much...but it was overall a very nice overview of Morricone's ouvre.
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I hope no one minds me interjecting here why I didn't see Morricone on Saturday night in New York.
When the Radio City Music Hall concert was first announced I checked with Broadway.com and they said that seats were $700.00 a piece. I was bummed, so I called my wife and told her about the bad news. She said we should go anyway, even though we live in L.A. (and I work for United Airlines), but I couldn't really justify spending such a huge sum, plus the cost of staying the night at The Algonquin and taxi fares and meals at restaurants, etc., etc. So I forgot about it.
Then I read here that Cat had two tickets, and I'm thinking how does this woman from New Jersey get two seats to this thing (or anybody else, for that matter), so I checked Ticketmasters and I see the price for a seat was now $200!
Needless to say I was bummed out all weekend. I could've been there. So what was this bullshit handed me from Broadway.com? Sorry, I'm just pissed off, could've met up with other music fans, could've been there. I know I would have loved it!
"I could've been a contender. I could've been somebody." I could've seen Ennio.
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Always check more than one ticket seller. Go price shopping. My tickets were $200 also for "best available seats". There were empy chairs in the upper rows as well, plus 30 minutes after the performance starts, you're permitted to move forward to better seating at Radio City.
I'm sorry you got hosed. I guess for the future, try to shop around.
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Posted: |
Feb 7, 2007 - 1:31 AM
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By: |
Howard L
(Member)
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I'm not a big fan of this article's author when it comes to his film music appraisals in the movies he critiques, but what he says here seems to reflect what has been posted to this thread.
From yesterday's NY Times:
Fistful of Themes, No Clips, From a Soundtrack Maestro
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
If the Italian composer Ennio Morricone has a musical signature, it is probably the wild-turkey squawk of the ocarina in his theme music from the 1966 spaghetti western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” That squawk, an anarchic battle cry that evokes a warped yodel and is sounded over martial equestrian drum rolls, was heard again on Saturday evening at Radio City Music Hall, where Mr. Morricone conducted 200 musicians performing excerpts from his film scores. Although he has written music for 400 movies, the musicians had prepared so little material that the last fourth of the two-hour event billed as “Morricone in Concert” was devoted to reprises of highlights from the previous 90 minutes.
In sheer size, the forces arrayed onstage were impressive: the Roma Sinfonietta of about 100 was augmented by the Canticum Novum Singers, an ensemble of roughly the same size. The solemnly presented event was the latest salvo in an international Morricone blitz whose climax will be an honorary Oscar later this month. (Over the years he has been nominated five times.)
By most measures this was a strange event: frustratingly short, the music unaccompanied by film clips or any other images. Although a program listed the selections, there were no annotations and no introductions to the themes, which were grouped in blocks with titles like “The Modernity of Myth in Sergio Leone’s Cinema” and “Social Cinema.” The orchestrations were conspicuously billed as “the same as the original soundtracks.”
What that meant acoustically was a blend of the natural sound of a large string orchestra with instruments like a heavily amplified harp. If the sound was passable, it was texturally thin, and it all seemed manipulated on a mixing board: unfortunate for a composer of some of the most voluptuous movie music ever created.
If it’s odd that Mr. Morricone’s music for westerns, which constitutes less than 10 percent of his output, has been so fetishized, while his more overtly symphonic film music has been relatively ignored, it’s understandable from an American point of view. His scores for Sergio Leone westerns revolutionized the vocabulary of western movie music standardized by Hollywood.
His introduction of rock ’n’ roll guitar descended from surf music out of Duane Eddy was an American cultural export. And the resulting hybrid, a slightly cheesy mixture of rock ’n’ roll and European formality, created a dramatic tension that energized movie music around the world.
Without the synergy between music and images that a visual component would have provided, Mr. Morricone’s Mediterranean variant on that European formality loomed large. If the musical forces were widescreen in size, the textures were simple and emphasized transparency and repetition. Melodic themes were short and tuneful, with the strings often doubled by a soprano (Susanna Rigacci) singing without words.
The romantic, contemplative side of Mr. Morricone’s film music found its richest expression in excerpts from the movies “Cinema Paradiso” and “Malèna,” in which he evokes an Old World nostalgia in sweet, dreamy passages that often feature a single wind instrument plaintively standing in for a character looking back. This particular emotional atmosphere is a specialty of Mr. Morricone, whose scores for “Bugsy” and “Lolita” locate the yearning little boy inside the corrupted adult. Unfortunately neither score, nor the great end title theme from “In the Line of Fire,” was included in the program.
What we heard of that style would also have been better served had the scores been rearranged as suites with themes and variations that evoked a narrative. This was also true of the concert’s abbreviated final block of three themes from “The Mission,” the 1986 film for which Mr. Morricone wrote one of his finest scores. For the few minutes it lasted, this pop pastiche of Mahler’s Second Symphony sounded magnificent, but it was over almost before it began.
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Posted: |
Feb 7, 2007 - 4:14 PM
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By: |
Morricone
(Member)
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I'm not a big fan of this article's author when it comes to his film music appraisals in the movies he critiques, but what he says here seems to reflect what has been posted to this thread.
From yesterday's NY Times:
Fistful of Themes, No Clips, From a Soundtrack Maestro
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
If the Italian composer Ennio Morricone has a musical signature, it is probably the wild-turkey squawk of the ocarina in his theme music from the 1966 spaghetti western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” That squawk, an anarchic battle cry that evokes a warped yodel and is sounded over martial equestrian drum rolls, was heard again on Saturday evening at Radio City Music Hall, where Mr. Morricone conducted 200 musicians performing excerpts from his film scores. Although he has written music for 400 movies, the musicians had prepared so little material that the last fourth of the two-hour event billed as “Morricone in Concert” was devoted to reprises of highlights from the previous 90 minutes.
In sheer size, the forces arrayed onstage were impressive: the Roma Sinfonietta of about 100 was augmented by the Canticum Novum Singers, an ensemble of roughly the same size. The solemnly presented event was the latest salvo in an international Morricone blitz whose climax will be an honorary Oscar later this month. (Over the years he has been nominated five times.)
By most measures this was a strange event: frustratingly short, the music unaccompanied by film clips or any other images. Although a program listed the selections, there were no annotations and no introductions to the themes, which were grouped in blocks with titles like “The Modernity of Myth in Sergio Leone’s Cinema” and “Social Cinema.” The orchestrations were conspicuously billed as “the same as the original soundtracks.”
What that meant acoustically was a blend of the natural sound of a large string orchestra with instruments like a heavily amplified harp. If the sound was passable, it was texturally thin, and it all seemed manipulated on a mixing board: unfortunate for a composer of some of the most voluptuous movie music ever created.
If it’s odd that Mr. Morricone’s music for westerns, which constitutes less than 10 percent of his output, has been so fetishized, while his more overtly symphonic film music has been relatively ignored, it’s understandable from an American point of view. His scores for Sergio Leone westerns revolutionized the vocabulary of western movie music standardized by Hollywood.
His introduction of rock ’n’ roll guitar descended from surf music out of Duane Eddy was an American cultural export. And the resulting hybrid, a slightly cheesy mixture of rock ’n’ roll and European formality, created a dramatic tension that energized movie music around the world.
The romantic, contemplative side of Mr. Morricone’s film music found its richest expression in excerpts from the movies “Cinema Paradiso” and “Malèna,” in which he evokes an Old World nostalgia in sweet, dreamy passages that often feature a single wind instrument plaintively standing in for a character looking back. This particular emotional atmosphere is a specialty of Mr. Morricone, whose scores for “Bugsy” and “Lolita” locate the yearning little boy inside the corrupted adult. Unfortunately neither score, nor the great end title theme from “In the Line of Fire,” was included in the program.
What we heard of that style would also have been better served had the scores been rearranged as suites with themes and variations that evoked a narrative. This was also true of the concert’s abbreviated final block of three themes from “The Mission,” the 1986 film for which Mr. Morricone wrote one of his finest scores. For the few minutes it lasted, this pop pastiche of Mahler’s Second Symphony sounded magnificent, but it was over almost before it began.
I think Morricone would have refused to do a program like he suggests. Like Herrmann Morricone feels the music he wrote for the screen has to be married to the film. If you re-do it in any way it has to be rethought because of different acoustics etc. So a concert, to them, is a whole other animal.
And every film music concert I have been to, with any composer, has practically everybody wanting other titles than the ones selected. With Morricone and over 400 titles he gets that in spades.
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