Ennio Morricone is one of the best loved of all film composers, and his scores for Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns are among the best loved of all. Rightly so, too, because they are unique in the extent to which they stretch out Leone's magisterially conceived and frankly operatic tableau, offering a unique degree of integration between score, dialogue and the general soundscape. But the disconnect between Hollywood westerns and Leone and Morricone's aestheticised approach to the genre has also given the films an air of comic exaggeration, and it is for this that they are often remembered.
This is certainly the case for the Spaghetti Western Orchestra, an Australian tribute outfit who have been touring the world with their DIY love letters to Morricone's scores. Five "slightly crazy serious musicians", as the classically trained instrumentalists call themselves, take on scores written in several cases for large orchestra and choir. But they don't stop there. In costume as bit-parts from the movies (one is a bank-teller, another a bartender), but with heavily stylised makeup, movement and speech, they seek to reproduce the experience of the films themselves, supplementing the music with sound effects drawn from cornflakes, rubber gloves, beer bottles and, at one point, the pummelling of an innocent cabbage.
It's ingenious enough, and there's no doubting the dedication of the performers in capturing the bizarre comedy of Leone and Morricone's movies. But they fail completely to access the uncanny, searching beauty of these films. As a result, after a strong beginning with the watch-chimes sequence from For a Few Dollars More, using the hall's organ at full blast, the jokes wore thin, the surprise effects stopped being surprising, and one began to notice the technical limitations of the musicians. It seems ungenerous, but this is an act better suited to YouTube than the Albert Hall.
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