Press Release from Quartet:
Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM and Universal Music Publishing Ricordi, presents a remastered reissue—for the first time in full stereo—of the 1966 classic, propulsive and exciting Ennio Morricone cult score for the thriller movie SVEGLIATI E UCCIDI, a successful Italian production directed by Carlo Lizzani and starring Robert Hoffmann, Lisa Gastoni and Gian Maria Volontè. The film is about a dangerous fugitive who meets a nightclub singer with whom he falls in love. They both get caught up in a spiral of increasingly reckless jewelry store robberies, leading to a tragic end when the police finally catch them.
Although Morricone was not the most prolific composer in the poliziesco genre—that role was more actively filled by Stelvio Cipriani and Franco Micalizzi—he did influence its early stylistic development by consolidating the use of music as an active narrative element: syncopated rhythms, marked bass lines, urban percussion, dissonant sounds to heighten tension, paranoia and urban chaos, or a fusion of jazz, funk and experimental music, are some of the resources that composers associated with the new genre would later use extensively. All these elements form the core of the score of SVEGLIATI E UCCIDI, which is narratively structured around its two protagonists. Morricone also provides the beautiful song “Una stanza vuota,” performed by Lisa Gastoni, that also serves as the film’s love theme.
The album was released in a short promotional run by RCA in Italy in 1966 and reissued on LP in the 1980s by the Intermezzo label, both in monaural sound. In the 1990s, the same program appeared for the first time on CD—paired with the score of CITTA’ VIOLENTA, also by RCA and in mono. In 2012, an expanded edition, featuring virtually the entire score, was released on CD by GDM, in hybrid sound with some tracks in stereo and others in mono.
This new edition, supervised by Claudio Fuiano and restored and mastered by Chris Malone, includes the same program in full stereo. The booklet includes an essay by Miguel Angel Ordóñez that discusses both film and score.
