Alessandro Alessandroni

★★★★ Prisma Sonoro THE ROUNDTABLE. LP First LP reissue of highly collectable 1974 recording of Italian film music pioneer. A childhood friend of Ennio Morricone, who later fell out with the great maestro, Alessandro Alessandroni is one of the cornerstones of Italian film music. It’s his twangy guitar riff on The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, his whistling that externalises the windswept melancholy of all those lone gunfighters, and his vocal group, I Cantori Moderni, who contributed the haunting wordless chorales to pretty much every spaghetti western. Less well known, though equally revered, are the albums of his own work, released across numerous Italian library labels in the 1970s. Described as the composer’s favourite, this is painfully gorgeous stuff, languid bossa nova, lamenting harpsichord, and mournful strings that echo the sorrowful vocal harmonies of Edda Dell’Orso; like a lost Morricone score to the saddest romance ever filmed.