Baarìa / Baaria

Venerated score composer Ennio Morricone is past 80 and semi-retired, but he returns to work for the first time in five years for Giuseppe Tornatore's autobiographical epic Baarìa, having written the music for all of the director's previous films, including the celebrated Cinema Paradiso. Appropriately for a soundtrack album that bears a photograph of the composer on the cover, the music is stamped with Morricone's signature style, melodic and lushly romantic. The stately opening theme, "Sinfonia per Baarìa," is an 11-minute work with the voices of the characters woven in among its contrasting motives. Morricone can be stirring ("Ribellione") and playful ("Un Gioco Sereno") in this varied score for a film covering 70 years in the lives of its characters. But his identity as a composer is rarely in doubt, and if this score does not sum up his style, it is a representative rendering of it.