This collection of suites is a product of Morricone's reworking of his own scores for film, intended for concert performances. I am not often a fan of rerecordings of film music: I prefer to hear the music tracks used, as typically found on albums designated "original motion picture soundtrack." This collection is of another kind altogether: well-thought-through compositional variations on the original music, beautifully performed by the Haydn Orchestra and conducted by the composer's son, Andrea Morricone. With a career output exceeding 400 film scores, Morricone gathered excerpts from 14 of them to create these suites, organized by films and their directors.

Included are a "Sergio Leone Suite," a "Giuseppe Tornatore Suite," and a "Brian De Palma Suite." Putting Morricone's best foot forward, the collection opens with three themes from Once Upon a Time in America, one of the greatest meldings of music and visual drama ever melded. The simplest musical materials get to the emotional heart of that great film about love and memory in such a powerful way that I tear up when I hear it. The solo violin part features Morricone's fine melodic gifts, thematic materials as used in the films but also newly created lines handed back and forth between violin and orchestra. In a fine interview, Marco Serino describes Morricone "reworking existing scores with me as soloist in mind ... talking in depth about the solo part and the scoring for orchestra." Playing gorgeously his Matteo Goffriller violin made in Venice in 1768, Serino gives voice to a great composer commenting on his own life's work.—Sasha Matson

The editorial review at Amazon reads:

For twenty years Marco Serino was Ennio Morricone’s violinist, the soloist on his film soundtracks and on world tours where they were reworked for the concert hall. In January 2020, after what proved to be his last public concert, at the Italian Senate in Rome, Morricone finished the transcription of this magnificent and unpublished collection, which recasts the themes of his most famous scores in suites transcribed for violin and orchestra. The work was carried out in close collaboration with Marco Serino and dedicated to him as a fruit of the artistic partnership between the two men. The collection alternates between pieces already performed in concert and others that are heard in this version for the first time. A year and a half after the composer’s death, this extraordinary document, a testimony to friendship and professional esteem, now becomes a recording project with the collaboration of Andrea Morricone, the composer’s son, who conducts the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento.

Morricone was extremely prolific and simply one of the best composers of film music that ever lived. His scores are innovative and often unforgettable. His propulsive "Strength of the Righteous" theme for Brian De Palma's The Untouchables is as striking now as it was in 1987. Just hearing Morricone's music for Casualties Of War brings De Palma to tears. The music Morricone provided for De Palma's Mission To Mars is truly inspired-- full of mystery and emotion, tangling hope and fear within a simple yet daringly otherwordly symphony of suspense. There's nothing else like it.

"In Django Unchained [2012], there’s that sequence where a dog attacks and eats a man. That was too much. I sent a message to Quentin Tarantino and told him that was too strong."

"Brian De Palma never smiles. But he is a great director: very good at choosing stories, he pays a lot of attention to the screenplay and he’s very accurate."