Unlike the recent giallo CD releases from DigitMovies, only the original album masters for Who Saw Her Die? / Chi l'ha vista morire? survived at Edipan's vaults, so while there's no unreleased alternates or bonus cues, it's still a superb album that demonstrates Ennio Morricone's knack for fusing disparate idiomatic concepts to create music that perfectly suits a film's locale, characters, and subtext.

Writer/director Antonio Bido's story of a broken father searching for his missing daughter in Venice is augmented by some of Morricone's most striking choral writing. The main theme contains unnerving harmonics that simultaneously characterize a playful, child-like atmosphere – mostly through a sing-song routine embellished with discreet business from iconic Renaissance instruments – and tragedy.

The two sections of the girls choir seem to battle for a dominant mood, with the libretto offset by eddying vocals from the opposing choir, portentously signaling the imminent tragedy of a young girl. A more optimistic cue is “Dindon campanon,” which shifts between a child-like melody sung by the choir, and brief shifts to woodwinds and harpsichord for the short recollections the father experiences as he wanders through the alleys of Venice .

“No Ghe' piu' bel cantar della Sera” is a wrenching elegy, and Morricone uses harpsichord and opposing choir again. The cue comes to a short rest, and the melodic line is continued by solo violin, with a gilded harpsichord and subtle electric bass in the background. Like the CD's opening cue, there's also an odd moment when the girls' harmonics wobble, as the voices hit a discord, and infer the tragic flaws that reside within the lead character's marriage, and missing daughter.

For “La bela riposava,” Morricone chops the choir into thirds, and the cue demonstrates his incredible skill in weaving various harmonies that mimic a liturgical work designed to spiral and echo through a formal cathedral. Underpinned with a more prominent electric bass and drum kit, the cue fuses contemporary pop with guilt-ridden harmonies, but never disintegrates into a forgettable pop instrumental. It's a quality that's typical of Morricone's approach – absolute sincerity when crafting dramatic underscore – and rarely writing a theme that's blatantly designed for a 45 RPM single. It's a key reason why so many of the composer's scores of this era are startling in their complexity and power, while the giallo scores of composers like Stelvio Cipriani were often comprised of complete theme variations with little formal dramatic cues.

“Il girotondo dele note” introduces the potent bass and rhythmic line that later forms the basis of “Canto della campana stonata,” the film's real main theme that's replayed (quite excessively) throughout the film whenever the killer or mortal danger is just a few seconds away. It's an intriguing use of echo-processed choir, and while some of the variations on the album show a bit of distortion when the vocals lunge above the orchestra, both cues illustrate the dominant force of the choir that clearly symbolizes the myriad girls that have been brutalized and murdered.

A pity there weren't any alternate cues left in the vaults, but Who Saw Her Die? – Vol. 3 in DigitMovies' Morricone Soundtracks Anthology - is a minor masterpiece among the composer's myriad giallo scores, with the ubiquitous Edda dell'Orso contributing vocals to parts of “El primo baso.”

© 2007 Mark R. Hasan