Conceived by Marino Formenti and Matthias Kranebitter, The Morricone Project unfolds as a multifaceted reflection on Ennio Morricone’s work. Across the program, Morricone’s music is refracted through diverse aesthetic lenses. Formenti’s three miniatures revisit a single scene from Once Upon a Time in the West from shifting perspectives. In Colpo d’ala, Patrizia Ruthensteiner reflects on Morricone’s innovative use of sound sources, employing her self-built, retuned electronic bell harps.

In In Between, Marco Döttlinger moves between well-known Morricone fragments, deconstructing and reassembling the beauty of his theme writing. A’Vrigogna traces the tension between Morricone’s iconic film scores and his experimental work, while Morire Sempre e Ancora Con, as Alexander Chernyshkov writes, unfolds like “a nocturnal kitchen conversation with an old friend.” Kranebitter’s Musik im Bild: Untermalung – Übermalung examines the relationship between image and sound through categories such as space, figure, and action.

Threading through the evening, two cowboys appear, enacting exaggerated scenes of fighting, duelling, hanging, and ultimately shooting each other—an ironic, self-aware nod to the clichés of the Western genre, directed by Philipp Lossau.