Special Notes:

Composed after Don't Look Now, Pino Donaggio's second film score is another clear indication of his versatility within diverse genres, and of how he became seriously underused during the eighties when he was hired to score lousy horror films, mostly with synths in place of the lush orchestras he enjoyed during the seventies and early eighties.

Corruzione contains orchestral and pop elements, but Donaggio's classical style dominates most cues, particularly his gentle use of piano and strings. The opening “Tema di Elena” introduces one of his loveliest themes: a warm accordion adds a mildly French quality, which Donaggio alternates with broad melodic strokes from various groups of strings, and closes with gentle strips of keyboards and flute.

The film's main theme is an urgent piece that pairs trumpets and strings with either brief vocals or brass mimicking vocals (the effects is quite blurry), adding a soft pop-jazz quality as the melody crests. A gentle, sparsely performed theme quotation from flutes closes the cue, and Donaggio's stylistic parallels to Herrmann are evident where he breaks up the theme into plaintive statements, evoking a almost child-like sense of abandonment.

“Indagine” is a contemporary action cue with grainy keyboards, intersecting strings, a steady drum beat, and brassy exhales, while an organ gives the fugue-like “Eccellenza” a religious quality.

Donaggio also offers an in intimate concert performance of his main theme in “Notturno.” Using solo piano, it's an elegant cue in which the theme is restated in introspective and harsh, demanding renditions, and it's a welcome change from lesser composers of the era who constructed longer versions of their themes by simply repeating the same bars to expand a cue, and showing no interest in developing a theme beyond a simple, easy to digest single.

The lone vocal cue is a source piece, “Gioia al cabaret” with a male and female duet backed by a small cabaret orchestra and honky-tonk piano, with some shifts between brass solos, and sudden dips into a lopsided waltz before an abrupt finale. An instrumental version – equally cheeky and bubbly – is also included in the brief “Gioia,” which sadly fades out before it can develop into a meatier cue, although a longer rendition resides in “Grottesco,” with spiraling accordion.

The only qualms with the score is its brevity, as many of the cues hover close to the two minute mark, but this is a real gem from the composer's canon. Corruzione bubbles with wit and tense drama, and it's full of Donaggio's own style, distinguishing the score from the criminal films of his contemporaries who sometimes adopted too many of Ennio Morricone's stylistic conventions.

Fine de Siecle's source materials show some age – there's minor distortion in some sparse areas of high frequency saturation – but it's an otherwise clean mastering, with informative liner notes covering Donaggio's early career, and sketches of the film.

© 2007 Mark R. Hasan