Dario Argento’s ‘opera prima’ ‘L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo’ premiered in 1970 and marked a historical and revolutionary debut as a truly original and innovative thriller. The stylistic choices of Argento mark a clear step forward from the thrillers of that era; even the soundtrack was something utterly special.
Argento assigned the score to Ennio Morricone, composer of the soundtracks for ‘Comandamenti per un gangster’, ‘C’era una volta il west’, ‘Metti, una sera a cena’ ‘Un esercito di 5 uomini’ and ‘La stagione dei sensi’, of which Argento had already written the screenplay. For this movie the maestro adopted a particular style that draws heavily on contemporary music and on the studies of his Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. With ‘L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo’ Morricone develops this approach and defines a ‘formula’: he alternates traditional songs, built around an easy and immediate melody used as a leitmotiv, with avant-garde and abstract tracks that amplify the state of uneasiness and fear in the viewers of tension and violent sequences.
Cinevox released this soundtrack on an LP with 10 tracks in the spring of 1971 when ‘Il gatto a nove code’ was already a big hit in the Italian cinemas. The record was originally issued in mono, with different tracks from the Stereo US version. This is the first vinyl reissue featuring the original score in Stereo, enclosed in a brand new artwork made by Adventprod studios!
