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Ennio Morricone in London

— A unique musical experience worth going down to London for.”

The composer Ennio Morricone is not just a hero of cinema, he’s also a hero of mine.

I can’t remember how I made the discovery that he’d be conducting the Rome Symphony Orchestra at the Hammersmith Apollo this weekend, but I do appreciate how lucky I am to have learned of this rare event, given that it was mostly down to a cancellation back in July.

Like many people, my first exposure to Morricone’s music was through the films of Sergio Leone. As a child, I was allowed to enjoy a few relatively non-violent snippets of the Dollars trilogy and I was hooked. So just as Morricone would score Leone’s later efforts before shooting began, I had heard his soundtracks before seeing the movies.

I managed to find a wizened copy of the-book-of-the-film of For A Few Dollars More – the second of the Dollars trilogy – among my father’s admirable collection of Steinbecks. It seemed like a truly authentic experience, reading from the old brown pages, with Clint Eastwood and the hawkish Lee Van Cleef on the bleached white cover. At any moment, I felt like a ticket collector might approach me and I’d ask him if the train stopped at Tucumcari.

In the bargain bin at Makro, while my brother bought Now 11 (I wish one of us still had that today), I picked up a cassette of Western themes by Geoff Love And His Orchestra. But I was a discerning listener and Geoff’s easy listening Montenegro-esque muzak didn’t sound too much like my father’s Morricone records, which crackled with life and what I now understand to be sonic innovation!

When first I saw Once Upon A Time In The West, I didn’t buy it. Where was Eastwood? He’d been supplanted by proper thesps in long coats and some heartstoppingly gorgeous but situationally inappropriate Italian beauty. Morricone’s music frequently took second place to silence, or buzzing flies, or creaking water wheels.

It would be years before I came to understand that West made the Dollars trilogy look like the cardboard cutouts Tuco blows away in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, and that Morricone’s music had entered a new phase of maturity. So had I, when I finally understood all this.

One day, I bunked off school to watch Once Upon A Time In America. My mother used to make many outstanding coffee cakes at that time and I was careful to avoid eating so much that it would be noticed. But the movie was as delicious and languid.

Someone once told Leone that coming out of America felt like finishing a 10-course meal, or similar. Morricone’s score is too beautiful to describe for someone of my lack of ability, but the fact that some idiot forgot to enter it for an Academy Award is grievous, for it was a certain winner.

I think that was the first time I realised that there was something inherently Italian about the maestro’s music. It was operatic, sure, but there was something in it that sounded like terracotta, vineyards and hills. It was passion.

I’m an avid collector of Morricone’s music and of course, there were dimensions to it of which I became aware later. He’s written scores for well over 400 productions ranging from rather dubious sexploitation to some of the finest films of all time.

Ennio Morricone has made naff movies good and good movies great. His work communicates far beyond the screen. It punctuates real lives as well as those of movie characters.

So here he was, onstage, conducting an orchestra. It all seemed unreal, but four encores and the way I filled up during almost every piece of music convinced me otherwise!