Why Ennio Morricone’s score from ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ means so much to Jaap van Zweden, music director of the Hong Kong Phil and New York Philharmonic
- Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ mesmerised a young Jaap van Zweden
- The score, by Ennio Morricone, is what particularly impressed the then 16-year-old student, now music director of the Hong Kong Phil and New York Philharmonic
Jaap van Zweden, the Dutch-born music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, tells Richard Lord how it changed his life.
I was living in New York when I saw it. I was 16 years old at the time. Besides going to lessons at (renowned performing arts conservatory) the Juilliard School, the only thing that I sometimes did, to relax, was go to the movies. I still remember the cinema, which was at 47th Street and Broadway, very close to Juilliard.
As a young man, I was completely mesmerised by the impact of this movie – by the acting and by the story, but above all by the music of Ennio Morricone.
The story is about America, and about surviving America, at a time when the country was being built. If you go to the American West these days, you can still feel the hard lives that people lived as they were building up the country.