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Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM and EMI Music Publishing Italia, presents a remastered, expanded edition of Ennio Morricone's avant-garde score for Elio Petri's UN TRANQUILLO POSTO DI CAMPAGNA (aka A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY) (1968). The film, a psychological thriller-drama starring Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave, is about a renowned and neurotic painter (Nero), who after moving into a dilapidated rural villa to reinvigorate his creative energies, becomes obsessed with an uninhibited countess who died there many years prior.
The film inspired one of Morricone's most fascinating scores, and one of his favorites. The composer based his ideas on two different musical styles: one more phantasmagorical, ethereal, and the other experimental, aggressive, with an essential contribution from the famous avant-garde group of which Morricone was a member: Gruppo D'improvisazione Nuova Consonanza. This musical duality allows Morricone to reflect how sanity gradually and irretrievably loses ground to madness in Franco Nero's character.
Although the score was very striking at the time—and led Elio Petri, who had always changed composers in previous films, to rely on Ennio Morricone as an essential collaborator in all his remaining movies—it was not released commercially. We had to wait a decade for a suite to be included on a compilation LP that brought together some of the composer's most experimental work for the cinema. In 2003, the Saimel label released the first official edition of the soundtrack, with a generous running time of 64 minutes and a program supervised by Morricone himself. The sound was entirely in mono, just as the tapes had survived. A few years later, GDM released a 40-minute CD with the recently discovered mock-up program for a General Music record that had been planned in 1968 and eventually canceled. It had less music, but it was all in stereo. For this Quartet edition, remastered by Chris Malone from the original master tapes, we have included the program for the stereo album, followed by a suite in four movements, the first three of which contain the music as presented in the movie, including unreleased cues, followed by a fourth movement containing unused and alternate tracks. Supervised by Claudio Fuiano, the release features a booklet that includes Simeone's famous original painting on the cover and an essay by Miguel Ángel Ordóñez discussing the film and the score.
- Quartet Records
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