Bruno Nicolai: La Dama Rossa Uccide 7 Volte OST (CAM Sugar/Decca) 2X LP, red vinyl
Purchased at The Government Center
I play largely instrumental music. It's always been my orientation, it's what I prefer.
I found that I'd often draw comparisons to film scoring. This irritated me, that people's only connection to to instrumental music was through film music.
Over the years, I turned around my opinion and became increasingly interested in film scores. I wanted to know about composers who were primarily known for film scoring (Ifukube, Elmer Bernstein) vs. "classical" composers who did occasional film work (Copland, Prokofiev, Takemitsu) vs. composers in popular idioms (jazz, rock, etc) who created interesting scores (Zappa, Herbie Hancock, Curtis Mayfield). I've come to think that the highest level of film composing is music that works effectively in the movie but can also be worthy of listening when separated from the visuals.
Bernard Herrmann is (and probably always will be) my #1 man in the field. I'd say 90% of the time, he's instantly identifiable, even though there's a wide range of expression in his scores.
My second favorite is Ennio Morricone. Unlike Herrman, Morricone is harder to pin down to a definitive style. Take for example is somewhat surrealistic scores to Serge Leone's somewhat surrealistic Westerns. (The Leone/Morricone "Man With No Name" trilogy is a director/composer pairing that stands toe-to-toe with Hitchcock/Herrmann.) There's Morricone's 60s-70s Eurocrime/giallo/horror/thriller scores, with its Italian pop tossed together with jazz-rock rhythm sections, distorted guitar, and string clusters. Then there's the later, lush Morricone of The Mission and others. He's very good at it, even if it's what interests me the least. And there are outlier scores, such as for The Thing, in which he created a John Carpenter-style score for a John Carpenter film.
Bruno Nicolai's name is closely associated with Morricone's. Often scores are listed as, "Composed by Ennio Morricone, conducted by Bruno Nicolai." Morricone's credits are on something like 500 films. That's an immense body of work, and it makes sense that some of the heavy lifting would be done by someone other than he. After all, in this day very few film composers do their own orchestration, let alone conducting or even arranging. I've never personally found John Williams to be all that interesting (there are exceptions), but I gave him major credit for being someone who can and often does all of those things.
I've been told there was a bit of jealousy on Nicolai's part, not being given enough credit for his involvement in Morricone's credited scores. I can't vouch for that one way or the other. Having listened to this and other Nicolai-specific scores, they sound very much like Morricone's thriller scores of the 1970s. I can't speak to who influenced whom, there's no doubt some on both men's parts. I see it as beig a little like the Picasso & Braque early cubist era, in which their works are often indistinguishable except by true experts.
This scores with a brief passage of wordless singing by a woman (or girl even?). It's not Edda Dell'Orso, who is Morricone's vocalist of choice. Had it been, this would have really sounded like Morricone.
We hear the familiar elements I've come to know in these types of scores: a kind of poppish instrumental theme, bouncy and light despite the menace that might occur later in the film. the theme is bounced around several times, in different keys and arrangements. There's the occasional string cluster and fuzz guitar I know so well too.
It would have been a solid single LP, but the double record presents the full score. That's fine. It's my complaint with many releases of this type. Even when some of the material is amazing, wonderful, stands up by itself, a full CD or double LP of the score is often too much for a separate listening experience. Another good example? Herrmann's Vertigo score. The main themes, the best moments? As good as film scoring gets. It's wonderful. Over an hour of cues? More than I need as a whole.
Still, I have a real affection for this style of soundtrack, even if this is not one of the absolute best I've heard.
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