Absolutely…Morricone II: Original Arrangements and Music for Cello, Flute and Piano
Same composer
Da Vinci Classics
Physical and Digital Release: 1 June 2018
Giuseppe Maggiolo Novella explores Morricone's sound world through piano interpretations of film music and original works, bringing familiar cinematic melodies into a more intimate setting.
13.67€
Soundtracks & Original Piano Works · 18 tracks
Track order and cue titles checked against the original booklet; durations verified on Apple Music and Deezer.
Born in 1977, Giuseppe Maggiolo Novella is an Italian pianist, composer, producer and teacher. His musical and theatrical projects come together under the name GMN Racconto di Suoni—“Tale of Sounds”. His solo recitals combine musical performance with narration and video. Following the example of Sviatoslav Richter, he performs with the score as an expression of humility and respect for the music.
His repertoire embraces many styles, from Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt to transcriptions of Wagner’s operas, music by Queen, Piazzolla, Morricone, Keith Jarrett and Ryuichi Sakamoto. He writes original music, film scores and music for theatre. His piano transcriptions include more than fifty Morricone pieces, as well as soundtracks by Rota, Williams and Horner. Other arrangements draw on Bach’s choral, orchestral, violin and cello music and works by Tárrega, Mascagni, Rossini and Donizetti. He has also made note-for-note transcriptions of performances by Jarrett, Monk and Gulda, and a concert version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
He teaches piano, keyboards and synthesiser using a personal approach that connects reading and playing with the relationship between music and the mind. An author of musical writings, he devised Musica X Tutti, a project encouraging interaction with audiences. At Studio 98 labs he leads piano courses and workshops in music history, applied theory, composition and improvisation.
His recordings include Movies Memories, devoted to film music; the book and CD Piazzolla Anima Tango; Forbidden Colours, a tribute to Sakamoto; and the concept album and video project SEASCAPE—Il senso del mare, produced by GMN Racconto di Suoni. His collaborations include Da Vinci Publishing, Associazione Mozart Italia, Fazioli, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, the Man Ray cultural centre, European Jazz Expo and Rotary International.
Ennio Morricone: (b Rome, 10 Nov 1928; d Rome, 6 July 2020). Italian composer. A favourite pupil of Petrassi, he also deputized secretly for his trumpeter father in a light music orchestra. He thus developed two distinct sides to his musical personality: one of these led him to embrace serialism (e.g. in Distanze and Musica per 11 violini, 1958) and the experimental work of the improvisation group Nuova Consonanza (from 1965); the other gained him a leading role, principally as an arranger, in all types of mass-media popular music, including songs for radio, radio and television plays, and the first successful television variety shows. In the early days of the record industry his innovative contribution played a decisive part in the success of the first Italian singer-songwriters (‘cantautori’), including Gianni Morandi and Gino Paoli.
After many minor cinematic collaborations, Morricone achieved wider recognition with Sergio Leone’s series of four Westerns, beginning with Per un pugno di dollari (1964). There followed important collaborations with directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci (from 1964), Pier Paolo Pasolini (from 1966) and Elio Petri (from 1968), and particularly successful films with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Allonsanfàn, 1974; Il prato, 1979), Valerio Zurlini (Il deserto dei tartari, 1976), Roland Joffe (The Mission, 1986) and Brian De Palma (Casualties of War, 1989). Despite inevitable self-repetitions over a total of more than 400 film scores, his work provides many examples of a highly original fusion of classical and popular idioms: this is noticeable already, albeit in somewhat crude form, in Leone’s series of Westerns, where the music for the opening titles juxtaposes three distinct types of music: a synthetic folk idiom, using the jew’s harp, acoustic guitar and harmonica to accompany human whistling; a contemporary, urban rock sound, featuring the electric guitar; and an unabashedly sentimental choral-orchestral style. With Giù la testa (1971) Morricone entered an experimental phase in which he developed a technique based on melodic, rhythmic or harmonic ‘modules’ (usually of 4, 8 or 16 beats in length), each differently characterized and often featuring a particular instrument. These are juxtaposed and combined to create very different stylistic atmospheres. The most impressive application of the modular technique is found in The Mission, where the single modules, more extended and clearly defined than before, interact dialectically, assuming very clear symbolic functions.
Morricone’s non-film works form a large and increasingly widely performed part of his output. Many of them use his technique of ‘micro-cells’, a pseudo-serial approach often incorporating modal and tonal allusions, which, with its extreme reduction of compositional materials, has much in common with his film-music techniques. His most fruitful season of concert-music composition began with the Second Concerto for flute, cello and orchestra (1985, from which the Cadenza for flute and tape of 1988 is derived) and continued with Riflessi (1989–90), three pieces for cello which represent perhaps the highpoint of his chamber music output, attaining a high degree of lyrical tension.
Morricone was an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a Commendatore dell’Ordine ‘Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana’. Among other honours, he received six competitive Academy Award nominations, Grammy recognition and a Leone d’oro. He received an honorary Academy Award in 2007 and won the Academy Award for Original Score for The Hateful Eight in 2016. In 2000 he was awarded the Laurea Honoris Causa by the University of Cagliari. Between 1991 and 1996 he taught film music (sharing a post with Sergio Miceli) at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena.
Ennio Morricone, like Giuseppe Verdi, is among Italy’s most widely known composers. Adapting his music for the piano is an important and complex undertaking. It took me fifteen years to develop these solo piano transcriptions: a real challenge, but also a great pleasure. I began playing his music in 2003, using some simple arrangements from a book lent to me by my friend Antonello Ancis. At the time I was studying composition and writing my first pieces, analysing the language of twentieth-century composers—from Mahler, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Messiaen to Cage—without…
Ennio Morricone, like Giuseppe Verdi, is among Italy’s most widely known composers. Adapting his music for the piano is an important and complex undertaking. It took me fifteen years to develop these solo piano transcriptions: a real challenge, but also a great pleasure.
I began playing his music in 2003, using some simple arrangements from a book lent to me by my friend Antonello Ancis. At the time I was studying composition and writing my first pieces, analysing the language of twentieth-century composers—from Mahler, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Messiaen to Cage—without overlooking the masters of film music, such as Rota, Herrmann, Williams, Sakamoto and, of course, Morricone.
A few years later, I refined my first solo piano transcriptions of soundtracks by Morricone and other composers and began presenting them in concert. The work was well received: in 2008, musician and publisher Bruno Camera offered me the opportunity to produce my first album, Movies Memories. I continued studying and transcribing. Over ten years, I tried out and repeatedly revised more than a hundred pieces, eventually selecting forty-five for my project The Essential Ennio Morricone Piano Solo. From these I chose the pieces for this recording, excluding those whose piano versions seemed furthest from the originals, including music from The Untouchables, Novecento and Nuovo Cinema Paradiso.
Bringing together “absolute music” and film music allows the programme to tell the story of Morricone’s multifaceted style. Alongside the soundtracks, I therefore included his original piano works Studio No. 1, Studio No. 4 and Rag in frantumi. The first study is built on a six-note scale and contrasting sonorities; the fourth centres on syncopated rhythms. Rag in frantumi unfolds through a succession of themes interrupted by sudden rests.
Listening carefully, we can hear affinities between these piano works and Morricone’s music for the screen. These include the rhythmic insistence of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion; the percussive bass and dissonant melodic writing of La Piovra; and the apparently regular rhythm of The Sicilian Clan, whose melody intersects with irregular harmonic progressions.
The transcription that acts as a pivot between the film pieces and the “absolute music” is The Hateful Eight’s “Last Stagecoach to Red Rock”, heard over the opening credits. I transcribed it note by note, with percussive basses creating continuous tension through an increasingly urgent and unsettling crescendo. The idea of a “non-melody” emerges clearly, deliberately contrasting with “Regan’s Theme”, another piece used in the film, before the programme reaches the “immortal melodies” of “Gabriel’s Oboe” and Once Upon a Time in the West.
Even in pieces with a prominently defined theme, listening from different perspectives reveals particular intentions. “The Ecstasy of Gold”, from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, was the most difficult piece to transcribe and perform on the piano. The rhythm accompanying the soprano and choral melody becomes a kind of galloping ride, with repeated figures and, towards the conclusion, superimposed rhythms and themes. It seems to evoke the final stretto of an operatic aria or a Bach fugue—or, in the language of our digital age, a layering of tracks, mixing fragments of the piece. This is the effect I sought to recreate in my piano transcription.
Before even reaching a first draft, the transcription process involved several stages: studying the sonorities, timbres and registers of orchestra and choir, comparing recordings, and listening to different live performances. Everything served one purpose: to reproduce the original sound, effect and character on the piano while respecting the musical idea of each piece. It is the work of a transcriber and interpreter who is also a great admirer of Morricone. The intention follows the path opened by Beethoven and developed by Liszt in his transcriptions of Beethoven’s nine symphonies and operatic music by Wagner and Verdi: to make the piano sound like an orchestra.
Giuseppe Maggiolo Novella. Original English translation by Chiara Bertoglio; English revised for this edition.
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