SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

The Spaghetti Western Orchestra: performs the film music of Ennio Morricone. Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 27.10.2010 (JPr)

 

The Spaghetti Western Orchestra

 

There are at least a couple of major tribute acts that I have heard of that have come out of Australia – Björn Again and the Australian Pink Floyd – and I think there are more. Because there was no programme book for this show I sat through most of this fairly short, interval-free, evening without realizing that this talented quintet also came from Down Under.

I haven’t the time to research this fully but it is clear that they all must be classically trained and their presentation is more ‘performance art’ than concert, befitting its origins at various festivals, including the Edinburgh Festival. They give the audience the mood and character imagery of the films of the Italian director, Sergio Leone, and faithfully reproduce excerpts from their epic film scores by Ennio Morricone.

Sergio Leone is no longer with us but his legacy lives on in the cinema legend he gave birth to, Clint Eastwood, the original ‘Man with No Name’ of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly films. Clint Eastwood only got the part after many others turned it down and set about cutting down his lines because there was too much exposition in the first 1964 script. So Clint Eastwood’s iconic screen persona became defined for all of the major part of his career. Thankfully Eastwood – whose fame began as an actor in Rawhide on TV in 1959 - is still going strong and he is revered as one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever actor/directors. Ennio Morricone, born a couple of years before Clint, became a very prolific and respected composer of film music because of the Leone ‘Dollars Trilogy’ and received an honorary Oscar in 2007, presented to him by Eastwood, as just one of the many awards his compositions have garnered during over the years.

The Spaghetti Western Orchestra was in fact first known as ‘The Ennio Morricone Experience’. Sound and music was very important to Leone’s films, often as a distraction, to watching a poorly dubbed film because, particularly in the early days, he used a polyglot cast each speaking in their own language. He used unusual camera angles, including extreme close-ups, and exaggerated visuals and sounds. It is these last aspects, as well as, Morricone’s magnificent music that the Spaghetti Western Orchestra resurrects. The band perform as characters – and in costumes - from one of Leone’s Wild West town - but remember these ‘Westerns’ rarely got further West than the Canary Islands. With their faces painted white, they look more performers in Cabaret but it is suggested that there is an 'invisible storyline' where each character comes alive again at the beginning of the show – conjured by the sunrise - to bring the music to life again. Added to this is the oft-announced search by these shades for someone called ‘Bob Robertson’ (an early pseudonym of Sergio Leone). Unfortunately this narrative is rather weakly played out and a more coherent ‘plot’ would make the show a more satisfactory experience.

What draws an audience to these shows? Certainly I wanted to see them and enjoyed the entertaining show, but wouldn’t go again. For me it was the memory of Eastwood in the films – as well as the magnificent film music – that brought me to the QEH. I will never forget the experience of seeing these five exceptional musicians involved in a gunfight, whose sonic world they brought to us by pushing a microphone into a large box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes – or a child’s boot into a small box! As well as employing vocal effects; a clapper is frequently used to provide the gunshots and the musicians ‘play’ innumerable proper instruments including the remarkable Theremin (for Once Upon A Time in The West), timpani, a vibraphone and unique ones such as, an asthma inhaler, knives, tuned beer bottles, string can guitar, coat hangers, rusty-door hinge, and at one point a rope, rubber glove, bouncy ball pump, and cabbage (don’t ask!), that all add to the sounds we hear.

There is the obligatory audience participation and as the show ends with a singsong and a reprise of the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly it would only be the hardest of hearts that hadn’t had a feelgood evening.

Jim Pritchard