11.06.10 Ennio Morricone

Born in Rome on 10 November 1928, remains one of Italy's foremost composers. He is renowned for the huge number of film scores he has written (almost 500 of them), thirty of which are for westerns. This latter genre is the reason for Morricone's worldwide fame. To give just one statistic- Morricone has sold more then 50 million albums. His individual and much-imitated composition style for this genre is exemplified by the soundtrack of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” by Sergio Leone, the director with whom Morricone enjoyed a long and fruitful partnership. The range of his output is impressively wide, embracing theatre productions, symphonic works for soloist and orchestra, choral compositions, chamber music and so on.  Morricone trained at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia, where he took a diploma in trumpet, band instrumentation and composition. He then played trumpet in a number of Roman orchestras, thus developing a practical spirit as well as making contacts in the showbusiness world. He began writing music for film in 1955, and at the same time worked as an arranger of light music for various orchestras and for records by Italian RCA. Morricone did however consider himself a "cultured" composer and continued to write contemporary classical music: the label "wizard of the sound tracks" had already become a burden to him. In 1958 he was taken on as a music assistant by RAI television, but he resigned the same day when he realised he would have no chance of career growth, and also when he learned that Filiberto Guala, the then director general of RAI, expressly prohibited the external broadcast of music composed by public television employees.
Morricone nurtured a long and productive collaborative relationship with Sergio Leone, as he did also with Bernardo Bertolucci. His first sound track for Leone was the score for “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964). Their collaborative work continued all through Leone's series of spaghetti westerns until his last film, the gangster-themed “Once Upon a Time in America”. Morricone penned some of Leone's best sound tracks and have contributed to their status as undisputed masterpieces.
Morricone won his first Nastro d'Argento in 1965 with the music for “Metti una sera a cena”. The second came just a year later for “Sacco e Vanzetti”. His first Oscar nomination came in 1979 for the “Days of Heaven” followed by “The Mission” in 1986 and then “The Untouchables” in 1987 . He was awarded a BAFTA in 1984 for the sound track of “Once Upon a Time in America”. On 25 February 2007, after five unawarded nominations, a rapturous standing ovation accompanied the presentation of his Oscar for Lifetime Achievement.
In 1995 he received a Golden Lion career achievement award at the 52nd Venice Film Festival.
Summer of 2006 saw him conduct the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Milan Scala Theatre, in a tour that played at the Verona Arena and other important venues such the Greco-Roman amphitheatre of Taormina. For the first time ever, the maestro conducted the Scala Orchestra and Chorus in a live rendition of his most celebrated film soundtracks.

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