Ennio Morricone attended the same high school as the director Sergio Leone, a handy link that stood them both in good stead when Leone was seeking a composer for a film that would redefine the sound of the traditional western. Morricone’s bold and highly personal music blew away the favoured Americana soundtrack in favour of short motifs and punctuated phrases scored for a heady mix of voices singing and grunting, harmonica, electric guitars and whistles. Audiences were first made aware of them in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the first of the so-called spaghetti westerns.

Decca has now produced this handsome tribute to Morricone, conducted by him and sequenced so that the music runs from one title to another virtually without a break, mood and key taking precedence over running order. Morricone finally won an Academy Award for Best Score in 2016 for The Hateful Eight, in which his thirst for innovative scoring shows no sign of abating. The Mission and Cinema Paradiso are familar enough but the romantically inclined Once Upon a Time in the West and the debonair Metti, una sera a cena (‘One Night After Dinner’), an Italian sex comedy from the late Sixties, bring a lighter touch. Although on a grander scale than the original soundtracks, these performances retain the flavour of them. For a Few Dollars More is played with gusto and the strings lend a dignity to the Death Theme in The Untouchables, with its veiled saxophone line. Authenticity is never in doubt.

‘Hollywood in the Concert Hall’ is Franz Groborz’s apt description in the booklet for ‘Music from the Motion Pictures’, which includes the Ride of the Valkyries from Apocalypse Now and the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, recently employed in The King’s Speech. Film composers have been reticent, to say the least, as to the increasing and indiscriminate employment of the classics in their film scores; suffice to say that these two interlopers are very well played and conducted in the company of the Rachmaninov-inspired Warsaw Concerto, the jovial Hobson’s Choice and Vertigo, the most substantial items. The Klanglogo label will no doubt have its knuckles rapped by a higher power than mine for crediting the James Bond theme to John Barry (nor is it his arrangement) instead of Monty Norman. The sequence of music works well and the resonant recording does full justice to some of the best screen music written over the past 70 years.