# La Viaccia (1961): rare blend of concert work & film score



## Prodromides

Whilst I have posted many an album image here within Talk Classical to refer to specific discs, I typically try not to push products.

The soundtrack from the 1961 Italian-French co-production *La Viaccia*, however, should be spotlighted @ TC, I feel.










The Spanish label "Saimel" has recently issued the music recorded for *La Viaccia*.
The monaural master tapes contain more than an hour of music (only about half of which can be heard while viewing the film).
Composer Piero Piccioni and conductor Franco Ferrara adapted Claude Debussy's 1908 "Rhapsodie for Saxophone and Orchestra" to suit scenes in the film, but the 10-minute piece was not played in its entirety in the picture. It can be heard as one of bonus tracks on this CD.
Piccioni composed his own music, too, and it alternates between impressionistic passages for the incidental underscore and 'source' music befitting the time period and provincial locale (masked ball waltz, songs, piano or mandolin solos, etc.)

Personally, this soundtrack is not ranked by me as one of Piccioni's Top 10 (such as *Senilita'* or *Il Bell'Antonio*), but I wish to mention it here because this is one of those infrequent specimens of a film composer not 'ripping off' classical music without proper credit. Indeed, Piccioni's own music keeps in character with the Debussy opus yet retains its own Piccioni identity.
As with Jerry Fielding's usage of Mahler in the 1974 *The Gambler* soundtrack, Piccioni's *La Viaccia* is a splendid film music/classical music crossover album that deserves attention and should not be overlooked by TC membership's radars.


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