Ennio Morricone

Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM and Sony EMI Italia, presents a completely revised, restored and remastered edition of The Desert Of The Tartars, Ennio Morricone’s masterpiece for the no less masterful film by Valerio Zurlini from 1976.

Co-produced between Italy, France, Germany and Spain, the film features a large cast of European film stars that includes Jacques Perrin, Vittorio Gassman, Giulianno Gemma, Helmut Griem, Fernando Rey, Francisco Rabal, Philippe Noiret, Max Von Sydow and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Based on the novel by Dino Buzzati, it’s an intimate epic about Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, who is assigned to the isolated old Bastiani border fortress where he expects an imminent attack by nomadic, fearsome Tartars. Although Zurlini worked assiduously with composer Mario Nascimbene, for this, his last film, he required the collaboration of Ennio Morricone for the film’s score.

Morricone wrote a score for a large orchestra, using the organ as a lead instrument to describe the immensity of the desert. Mystical, romantic, nostalgic, The Desert Of The Tartars is one of the Roman maestro’s greatest works and one of his personal favorites. A General Music LP appeared in 1976 with an extensive selection of the score, but unfortunately its first appearance on the digital market with the 1997 CD was disappointing, as the sound was sourced from vinyl since the master tapes were apparently missing.

GDM’s subsequent release in 2011 recovered the master album in good stereo sound and added a handful of mono bonus tracks and film versions taken from the music stems. For this edition, Chris Malone has restored and remastered the stereo album master tapes and the stems from the ground up, including the same material as the previous GDM release. The album is produced by Dániel Winkler and Claudio Fuiano, and the package includes a 16-page booklet with in-depth liner notes by film music writer John Takis.