Dio Perdoni La Mia Pistola

Composer Vasco Vassil Kojucharov was born in Bulgaria, but decided to make his home in Italy. He studied initially in Sofia then moved onto Moscow where he furthered his musical education at the conservatory there under the watchful gaze of Aram Khachaturian. After a number of years conducting the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra the composer continued to study with Franco Ferrara at the legendary conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Italy, his ties with Italy were strengthened when he began to compose music for the cinema and collaborated with Maestro Nino Rota. The Italian composer frequently praising and spotlighting Kojucharov’s artistry and strength as a composer and conductor. Kojucharov’s music is something of an unknown quantity amongst collectors, the reason for this being the lack of recordings that are available. Thankfully BEAT records in Rome has partly remedied this by releasing a handful of compact discs containing his music from Italian made westerns. This is one of the latest additions to the BEAT catalogue and boasts two western scores, DIO PERDONI LA MIA PISTOLA and ANCHE DJANGO LA CAROGNE HANNO UN PREZZO. Both scores contain many of the standard musical trademarks that we all now associate with the spaghetti western score and the genre as a whole, and in a number of ways the style that the composer employs is not a millions miles away from the style and sound achieved by composers such as De Masi, Cipriani, Lavagnino and Fidenco. His use of solo trumpet combined with harmonica (performed by Franco De Gemini) and rich sounding electric guitar is stunning and evokes memories of the origins of the Italian western score. The composer also utilises strings and percussion to great effect, the strings either underlining the composition or sweeping it forward, whilst the percussion acts as a perfect enhancement and background to the proceedings, augmenting and punctuating with dramatic and booming force. Each score has fine thematic properties and highly melodic cues which the composer develops and repeats from time to time in differing arrangements or maybe faster tempo or at times downbeat versions of each scores central theme can be heard. Both soundtracks are worthy additions to any collection, and I am confident that once heard you will be returning this disc to the player for regular outings. I look forward to more music from Maestro Kojucharov very soon. Maybe his excellent score for DJANGO THE BASTARD will one day get a release.