Shhhh - The Empathy of a Cover Picture
If I said it out loud, I’m sure I could think of many
examples, feeling I had to, but if I just write it here, like a whisper, and because I’ve just listened to this album’s
version of the song, were I to ask, quietly, what
music moves me the most, I would reply softly and undemonstratively Ennio Morricone’s song-score Deborah’s Theme.
This choice is definitely linked to the first time I heard it when
watching for the first time, obviously, the film Once Upon a Time in America. The theme runs throughout the film
[and whole soundtrack] in a number of variations, but it is always intensely
emotive in its orchestral beauty, and plaintive about lost love, though also powerfully but negatively about the horror of abused passion.
The most personally moving music
should actually be John Martyn’s Head and
Heart, and probably is, or Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, or Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings [all the clichés, I
know, again], or in fact any other number of John Martyn songs, but right here right now
it is Deborah’s Theme.
This whole album of Morricone music arranged and conducted
by the man himself after 60 years of writing film-scores is excellent, not least
his gunslinger groundbreakers.
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