Ennio Morricone Conducts Morricone - His Greatest Hits

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* Sony Classical releases “Ennio Morricone conducts Morricone – His Greatest Hits”, celebrating Morricone’s 60 years of music making * The album features his most popular movie themes, selected, conducted and produced by Morricone himself * It contains music from films including "Once Upon a Time in the West", "Cinema Paradiso", "The Good The Bad And The Ugly", "The Mission" * In 2016 and 2017 Morricone will present parts of this repertoire internationally on his "The 60 Years of Music Tour" "To conduct my music for the cinema with the Orchestra and Choir of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, with the singers Gemma Bertagnolli, Dulce Pontes, and Angelo Branduardi, was for me an unforgettable experience. I am grateful to Sony Classical for giving audiences around the world, and myself, this important document of my career." (Ennio Morricone) The jury may still be out, but one thing is already certain – when all the votes are tallied, Ennio Morricone will be counted as one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. That is all the more remarkable, since very few composers, particularly of foreign birth, have yet to achieve this status in on art form that, like the movies that spawned it, is purely a phenomenon of the century we are on the verge of leaving behind. Recorded in Rome in 1998, this album came about as the result of a happy encounter. “Some years ago, Bruno Cagli, the superintendent of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia had asked me if I would do a concert of my film music at the Accademia,” the composer recalled recently. “I agreed, provided that I’d be allowed to use their fine musicians.” With so many themes to choose from, final selection proved a daunting task. As Morricone explains, “I finally zeroed in on the themes that I thought the public loved the best.” This album proves a fine tribute to one of the best film composers of the twentieth century. Morricone was born in Rome in 1928 into a musical family. His her, a trumpet player, had acquired a solid reputation in musical circles as a performer who was equally at ease in jazz, opera and film music. At the age of six, young Ennio devoted himself to music and at seven studied composition; at ten, he enrolled at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, graduating in 1956. During his formative years, Morricone showed little interest in film music, but his professional interest was piqued, in 1954, after he attended a screening of The Rabe, scored by Alfred Newman. In 1959, he received his first full scoring assignment when director Luciano Salce asked him to write the music for the film Il Federale (The Federal Soldier). Over the next couple of years, Morricone scored a dozen movies, including Duello nel Texas (fight at Red Sands) in 1963, his first Western, and Malamondo, in 1964, which attracted international attention to his budding talent. By the early 1960s the Western had become all but extinct in Hollywood. In Europe, meanwhile, the film was enjoying tremendous popularity, most notably in Germany, where homegrown films, many of them starring expatriate American actors, took stories bused in the Old West and gave them a continental spin. What neither Sergio Leone nor Ennio Morricone had anticipated was that their Fistful of Dollars relationship would have such amazing results from the start. Not only did it set the tone for the more than thirty-five Westerns Morricone scored subsequently, it introduced a style that, over the years, became widely admired and imitated. With more than three hundred scores to his credit, in recent years Morricone has taken to writing more selectively for the screen. He may appear frequently in concert; but it is largely to perform selections from his most famous scores, as this demonstrates.