Not just any old Ennio

>> The Spaghetti Western Orchestra act out
the music of the maestro Morricone

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AUSTRALIA:
The Spaghetti Western Orchestra

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

It would be inaccurate to say that Australia’s Spaghetti Western Orchestra—reprising this past summer’s Jazz Fest success with a string of dates at Festival Montréal en Lumière—perform the music of Ennio Morricone with a maniacal attention to detail. Oh, the details are there. Not just the Italian composer’s unforgettable film scores but key bits of dialogue and sound effects as well. The catch is the verb.

“What they’re doing isn’t just performing the music,” explains Denis Blais, the group’s Canadian-born director and designer. “They’re acting it out.”

“Soundscape cinématique,” Blais calls it, “an audio collage that stirs a visual euphoric recall, so to speak, back to one’s first encounters with those magical Italian Westerns of [director] Sergio Leone. We bring the sound, you make the movie.”

Founded as the Ennio Morricone Experience in 2001 by Patrick Cronin and Graeme Leak, the rechristened SWO also includes David Hewitt, Boris Conley and Philip McLeod. The quintet, decked out like ghosts of the Old West on a day pass from Boot Hill, match a mastery of Morricone’s many musical resources with precision-timed theatrical skills.

There’s plenty of room for the latter in the soundtracks to Leone’s Euro-Westerns, of which The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is only the best known. His highly stylized, even abstractionist revision of the iconic American form was mirrored in Morricone’s scores which, while waist-deep in Weltschmerz, exhibited a playfulness and ingenuity comparable to Spike Jones or Carl Stalling.

In addition to mimicking the music’s curious vocal flourishes—and choice lines from the scripts—the SWO deploy dozens of different odds ’n’ ends in recreating particular sound effects. “Nail clippers, rubber gloves, Corn Flakes, Savoy cabbage and wooden clogs,” Blais lists as examples. “We try to pay homage to the full scope of Morricone’s complexities, digging deep into his classic tonal spittoons.”

The key task for Blais has been defining the show’s visual dimension to highlight rather than fight with the sound.

“The show is in fact a reversal of the dynamic duo’s roles. The dark, elegiac shadow of the Morricone score is now in the lead role, and the big close-ups and wide shots of Leone are the backdrops.”

At Théâtre Outremont on Wednesday to Friday,
Feb. 20–22, 8 p.m., and Saturday, Feb. 23, 6:30 p.m.
and 9:30 p.m., $32.50–$43.50