Search - Ennio Morricone, Gillo Pontecorvo :: La Battaglia Di Algeri

The Battle of Algiers music

Armchair Odysseus | San Francisco, CA USA | 03/10/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Morricone is a sublime and powerful composer. Just hearing the music makes me wish I had the DVD. I bought it for the raspy flute solo one of the local radio stations played during a fund drive. It was so haunting I had to have more of it. The flute solo evokes the heat, dust, and quiet of North African desert towns mixed with a

brave, complicated, flawed human struggling to make things right. I was surprised to find this theme taken up

by the orchestra in other tracks, in a long conversation between the solo flute and the orchestra. The beginning of the CD has a lot of martial music - probably accompanying the scenes when the French enter Algeria as they begin to quell the uprising in their colony. The Battle of Algiers speaks to the arrogance of Western culture as it deals with a civilization far older, wiser, more enduring, and more devious. Morricone's music is both appropriate as music to drive the emotions of a movie and stands up well next to the works of any other modern composer. I just don't like martial music - that's why the 4 stars."