Music Composed by Ennio Morricone
Rating: ***

Morricone compilations are dime a dozen, but it’s rare that you see one of those compilations advertised in the circulars or sitting prominently in the new release section of your local music chain. I can’t think of another artist who can inspire artists so diverse as Celine Dion, Bruce Springsteen, Yo-yo Ma, Metallica, Herbie Hancock, Rene Flemming, Andrea Bocelli, Roger Waters, and Quincy Jones to contribute to one album, but Morricone’s appeal apparently spills into just about every genre. Timed to take advantage of the Morricone’s Honorary Oscar, Sony Classical gathered this enormously eclectic group of artists to pay tribute to the maestro. And with such a wide range of talent, you’d think the disc would be all over the place. Sadly, however, it’s not. With a few exceptions, the album is just as consistent as every other gushy Morricone compilation, making it a pretty dispensable addition to the maestro’s canon.

Certainly, with such a range of talent, there’s a pretty wide range of quality between the covers. And Celine Dion’s opening “I Knew I Loved You” is by far the most cringe-worthy addition to the album. “Debra’s Theme” from Once Upon a Time in America is one of Morricone’s most beautiful themes, but setting hackneyed lyrics to for Dion to croon cheapens the melody immeasurably. This sadly, was the song they used to represent the maestro for his Oscar tribute – I had to beg my friends not to let it sour their outlook on Morricone.

Ennio Morricone

Fortunately, the next piece is an excellent cover of Morricone’s single most famous theme, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Few cover this theme to any success, but Jones and Hancock give it a fantastic reading. They’re two of the very few performers on this planet who can actually play this piece without butchering the furious melody in the bridge, and they even manage to add their own distinct signatures on top of it. It’s a slightly more mellow and streamlined jazz reading of a masterpiece that never looses the original’s insane vitality. This actually may be the only cover of the piece worth mentioning in the same sentence as the original recording, and that includes the hugely overrated Hugo Montenegro cover.

Bruce Springsteen follows with an almost-as-good electric guitar solo on “Jill’s Theme” from Once Upon a Time in the West. It may seem odd that Springsteen chose Jill’s theme over “The Man with the Harmonica,” given that the latter piece actually has substantial writing for electric guitar, but he brings a pitch-perfect blend of edge and sensitivity to his performance on one of Morricone’s most heartbreaking melodies.

But if you were afraid that I was actually going to do a track-by-track rundown of the entire album, fear not – it just happens that the three most notable pieces are the first three tracks. From here on, everything starts to blur together. Opera and classical stars follow with a seemingly never-ending sequence of bittersweet Morricone themes. It’s always baffled me that compilations of a man with such a diverse body of work always wind up covering the same basic material. Yes, Morricone’s love themes are beautiful, but do we really need to group so many similar melodies back-to-back? You’d think that Metallica could shake things up with their hard-rock recording of “The Ecstasy of Gold,” but even their reading is surprisingly bland, lacking in any of the energy of the original piece (or of hard rock in general). Even many of the best covers, like Ma’s cello solo on Malena or Roger Water’s painfully fragile reading of “Lost Boys Calling” (one of my favorite Morricone songs), seem to have been imported directly from other albums, where they worked much more effectively.

That’s not to say that the core material isn’t beautiful in its own right, and the disc has the added incentive of new instrumental transitions between the tracks that Morricone composed just for this album. But after 70 minutes, it all gets fiercely monotonous, and it takes a pretty damn dedicated Morricone fan to get through the entire thing in one sitting. It would be nice if just one mainstream Morricone compilation had the balls to shake things up with his more energetic and off-kilter showstoppers. The Yo-yo Ma compilation came close, but there’s so much more to Morricone that seems to be hidden from the public at large. We All Love Ennio Morricone probably has an audience somewhere, but anyone with passing familiarity in his music will probably just get frustrated and bored by this compilation, however strong the core material may be. The handful of great discovers, particularly the Quincy Jones/Herbie Hancock cover, will make it worth it for some people, but this album is nowhere near the top of Morricone must-haves.

Music Composed by Ennio Morricone; Produced by Luigi Caiola; Label: Sony Classical, (06590-2); Availability: In-print; U.S. Release Date: May 3, 2006.

01. I Knew I Loved You - Celine Dion (4:53)
02. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
- Quincy Jones Feat. Herbie Hancock (6:44)
03. Once Upon A Time In The West - Bruce Springsteen (3:40)
04. Conradiana - Andrea Bocelli (4:27)
05. The Ecstasy Of Gold - Metallica (3:50)
06. Malena - Yo-Yo Ma (4:15)
07. Come Sail Away - Renée Fleming (5:03)
08. Gabriel’s Oboe - Ennio Morricone (2:50)
09. Conmigo - Daniela Mercury Feat. Eumir Deodato (4:16)
10. La Luz Prodigiosa - Dulce Pontes (5:04)
11. Love Affair - Chris Botti (4:49)
12. Je Changerais D’avis - Vanessa & The O’s (3:51)
13. Lost Boys Calling - Roger Waters (5:37)
14. The Tropical Variation - Ennio Morricone (3:29)
15. Could Heaven Be - Denyce Graves (2:18)
16. Addio Monti Taro - Hakase (2:56)
17. Cinema Paradiso - Ennio Morricone (1:52)

Total Playing Time: 69:54