Once Upon a Time... (The Essential Ennio Morricone Film Music Collection)

Ennio Morricone's vast film music canon spans 500 productions, three continents and countless record labels great, small and defunct. Some purists may still balk at the notion of re-recordings, but this 1999 release by the City of Prague Philharmonic does a credible job of recreating much of il Maestro's enticing music, if not always its original sonic landscape. It's intended as an introductory overview, one that covers often familiar territory via large swaths of Morricone's legendary collaborations with Sergio Leone and more emotionally evocative fare from Cinema Paradiso and The Mission. But it also shrewdly mixes in a generous selection of otherwise out-of-print or hard-to-find music that includes his first Oscar-nominated score for Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, disparate cues for the later Eastwood films Two Mules for Sister Sara and In the Line of Fire, and a dizzying array of international productions that span The Red Tent and Bertolucci's 1900, the '70s-savory, Eurocentric charms of The Sicilian Clan and ""Chi Mai"" and the chilling, modernist horror of John Carpenter's The Thing.."