It's amazing really that Ennio Morricone, one of the world's foremost composers of any kind, spends most of his time these days writing music for Italian tv movies that barely anybody will see.  Perlasca, his latest, is director Alberto Negrin's biopic of an Oskar Schindler-style converted fascist who saves Jews from death during the holocaust.  

Much of the score is built around tension-building devices.  Nobody does it better than Morricone, but sometimes the results in album form can be somewhat unlistenable.  I wouldn't describe anything in Perlasca as unlistenable, but some of it certainly makes for a slightly unpleasant experience.  At other times - "Doppio canto", for example - Morricone floods his music with emotion - anguish, pain, suffering.  The results are actually highly moving - for once he takes a melodic approach to this sort of thing, with a tender piano theme dominating several tracks, as he eschews the dissonance you may expect him to use for sequences such as these - well, with a couple of exceptions!  (Such as the virtually unbearable "Oltre il suono" and dissonant - but bearable! - "Perlasca e la fuga".)

Of course, a film like this is going to have some emotive, moving themes, and Morricone does not disappoint.  The most attractive are "Primo tema", with another piano theme, the imaginatively titled "Secondo tema" and finally the stunningly beautiful "Romanticamente interiore" - most Morricone scores these days feature at least one or two stunningly beautiful pieces, and these latter two are Perlasca's.  Based - as so many of Morricone's romantic themes are - on wonderfully expressive viola solos by Fausto Anzelmo, they are easily the album's best.

Somehow, though, despite everything going for it, Perlasca just doesn't quite seem to come off as well as you might expect.  Each cue is fine in and of itself, but the album as a whole isn't quite as good as the sum of its parts.  It just doesn't have that special something that really mark the best Morricone scores apart from the crowd.  Certainly recommended for the die-hard Morricone fans but perhaps not for the wider audience.

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