The son of a judge who trained as a lawyer before abandoning the profession for music, Piero Piccioni brought to Italian cinema a compositional intelligence that set him apart from almost every contemporary. His collaborators included Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, and Francesco Rosi - a list that places him closer to the art film than the genre picture. Yet it is in the crime and thriller scores of the 1970s that his work finds some of its most inventive expression, and Fatevi Vivi, La Polizia Non Interverrà - composed for Giovanni Fago's 1974 kidnapping thriller, also known as Kidnap, with Henry Silva, Gabriele Ferzetti, and Philippe Leroy - is among the finest of them. Musica Per Immagini's reissue is its first ever appearance on vinyl, remastered from the original EMI Music Publishing masters.

What distinguishes Piccioni here is his refusal to settle for a main theme and a secondary one. Instead, he builds a network of leitmotifs - one for each salient situation, one for each principal character - that accumulate across the film's running time into something richer and more internally coherent than most genre scoring allowed. The opener "Lovely Mood" establishes a bittersweet, pentaphonic atmosphere shadowed by tubular bells. "Ambushers" moves in an entirely different register - bass, guitar, piano, and string counterpoint, with the tight, broken quality that beatmakers would later recognize as a hip-hop break before the term existed. "The Persuaders" drives on irresistible brass. "Sicilian Mafia" is punctuated by the traditional drone of the Jew's harp. Lounge atmosphere, explosive action, melancholy, tension - the score covers the full arc, and none of it sounds borrowed from anyone else.

Piccioni is one of the most underappreciated composers in the entire Italian film music canon. This record makes the case without argument.