The Italian Silver Age was also an incredibly prolific and immensely popular era of film scoring that gave us the likes of Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Piero Piccioni, Riz Ortolani, Armando Trovajoli, Stelvio Cipriani, Carlo Rustichelli, Piero Umiliani, Francesco De Masi, Luis Bacalov, Carlo Savina and Guido & Maurizio De Angelis, among many others. The 1960s and ’70s boasted an unmistakable flair for memorable tunes, great thematic variations and scores that could work exceptionally well on an album, away from their respective films. In fact, the large number of great scores tied to barely known movies has become the bane of soundtrack producers as there are so many wonderful scores that go unheard due to the relative obscurity of the pictures or the composers. Even if we were to release three or four titles each month, it would be decades before we could close the book on the great archives of Italian film music.

For this reason, Quartet Records aims to speed up the process and offer it at a reasonable price with its new collection of multi-CD sets dedicated to the Italian Silver Age. The aim of this project is to release rich, thematically connected box sets, each featuring scores that may be a hard sell on their own—but which should be more enticing when given a deluxe “bulk discount.” This first such collection includes a great variety of genres and composers—from marital dramas and comedies through horror and heist movies to the family film Verso l'Avventura, featuring commercially underrepresented composers such as Daniele Patucchi, Gian Piero Reverberi, Teo Usuelli, Gino Peguri, Romano Mussolini, Carlo Pes, Peppino de Luca, Gregorio García Segura and Fred Bongusto. What all the scores included have in common is a strong romantic and lounge vibe, so characteristic of Italian soundtracks of those years.

Some scores are either previously unreleased or, if there have been any prior digital releases, significantly expanded. Others have only been previously released on LP (Cara Sposa, Eeutanasia di un Amore, Il Debito Coniugale) or, like Il Divorzio, in an obscure Japanese edition decades ago. This collection has been produced by Claudio Fuiano and painstakingly mastered by Chris Malone from the original master tapes. The package includes a richly illustrated 28-page full-color booklet with an in-depth essay by the late and much missed Gergely Hubai, who had worked hard on this project for several months. We hope to release more boxes with so many treasures if this initial release does well.