Tonight the homage to Ennio Morricone and the trumpeter Michele Lavagnino [archived newspaper article]

 Il Grecale

August 24, 2021

The 34^th edition of Castello Cinema continues successfully, a classic summer event promoted by the Commune of Barletta and entrusted to the Sette Rue Cooperative. The Piazza d’Armi with the exhibition becomes the fulcrum of a cultural heritage that combines history and the seventh art.

Today, Thursday August 24, at 9 pm, the multi-award-winning documentary directed by Giuseppe Tornatore to adorn an international music talent is scheduled for “Ennio”.

In the path of "Ennio", the Apulian trumpeter and composer Michele Lacarenza, performer and author of several soundtracks, enters fully qualified, born in Trinitapoli on January 7, 1922, and died in Rome on November 17, 1969.

The humble genius narrating himself in the Sicilian director's work could not at all neglect that sublime trumpet, my friend, initially snubbed by Sergio Leone.

In 1964 on the occasion of the film "Per un pugno di dollari" Morricone for one of the main themes of the music of the feature film I immediately think of Michele Lacarenza, clashing with Leone who preferred Nini Rosso. “In compatible - says Ennio Morricone - and in the hall I played the Lacarenza he did not want. I played with tears in my eyes, putting my soul into it, seducing the director by that intense and poignant sound."

That trumpet, as the singer-songwriter Vinicio Capossela has repeatedly pointed out, "Tears the long Leonian silences, calls to a showdown, like a cry of goose rising from the stone and the desert,"

Michele Lacarenza continued to work with Morricone and Leone. He entered the great orchestra of Gorni Kramer and Armando Trovajoli and the Rai Orchestra with Enrico Simonetti and was the author of film soundtracks and record compositions.

Family of virtuous musicians, that of Lacerenza in Trinitapoli. Giacomo, Michele's pope at 16, won a competition for trumpet players and was awarded by King Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan during the Simplon parade. He directed the bands of Montemesola, Laterza and Trinitapoli, composed symphonic poems, marches, overtures and wrote “Tristezze” for the Tarantina Holy Week, still today the soundtrack of the “Perduni”. His three sons (Amleto, Michele and Rosario) devoted themselves to music with extraordinary results.

Michele for years was a trumpet teacher at the Conservatory of Foggia and then in Rome at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia, where he graduated in 1943, knowing and attending Ennio Morricone. In the capital Lacerenza successfully undertook the activity of conductor and composer of music for musical comedies, soundtracks and songs with famous actors and singers such as Wanda Osiris, Carlo Dapporto, Carlo Giuffre, Aldo Fabrizzi, Alberto Sordi, Alberto Rabagliati, Bruno Matrtino, Claudio Villa.

 

The vibrant sound of Lacerenza's trumpet contributed enormously to fueling the main characteristics of Sergio Leone's West marked by sharp close-ups and ironic and mocking laughter, in a landscape and climate that brought back trumpeter and director in an atmosphere very close to their southern origins.