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For Composer Ennio Morricone, a Goodwill Mission at the U.N.
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Recorded sounds of chants, from the Middle East and elsewhere, punctuate the chords as the live choirs sing their own lingering wordless notes.
Maddening chaos breaks out like a storm, building to a horrible dissonance of machine gun-like drums and shrieks.
Then the cathartic moment.
The storm subsides suddenly. The tension is released and a rainbow appears -- Morricone's "Falls" melody from his Oscar-nominated score from the 1986 movie "The Mission."
As the speaker said, it's a sad song, seemingly asking, "Why?" The 27-minute piece ends on a leading tone -- failing to provide an answer.
The good followed the bad and the ugly after intermission, with Morricone leading the orchestra in some of his film music, starting with the theme from Brian De Palma's 1989 Vietnam movie "Casualties of War."
The program wasn't all solemn -- there was the gospel-like "Abolicao" from the 1969 movie "Queimada," the uplifting Respighiesque "Scattered Sheets," the joyful theme from 1969 Italian comedy "H2S" and a sly song from the 1969 movie "The Sicilian Clan."
The final pieces on the program were the Morricone classics from "The Mission" -- "Gabriel's Oboe," "Falls" and "On Earth as It Is in Heaven."
After a four-minute standing ovation, Morricone and the orchestra performed music from his spaghetti Westerns, including "Once Upon a Time in the West," "Ecstasy of Gold" and, of course, the coyote theme from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."
