Beat Records returns with a new CD edition of Ennio Morricone's score for Il diavolo nel cervello, the 1972 psychological thriller directed by Sergio Sollima. Long absent from Italian shelves, this is a rare excursion into giallo territory for a director better known for westerns and crime pictures, and it drew from Morricone one of his most fully realised scores for the genre - a lyrical main theme carried by the voice of Edda Dell'Orso, set against dissonant string writing and passages of real unease. Twenty tracks, expanded from the composer's own ten-track album sequence, remastered from the original stereo and mono session tapes. Not to be missed.

Sollima and Morricone were regular collaborators by 1972. The composer had scored La resa dei conti (1966), Faccia a faccia (1967) and Città violenta (1970), and would return the following year for Revolver. Il diavolo nel cervello sits between the last two, and marks a departure for both. Written by Sollima with Suso Cecchi D'Amico, the screenwriter behind Ladri di biciclette, Rocco e i suoi fratelli and Il Gattopardo, and photographed by Aldo Scavarda of Antonioni's L'avventura, the film assembles an unusual cast - Stefania Sandrelli, Keir Dullea fresh from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Micheline Presle, Maurice Ronet and Tino Buazzelli - for a story of murder within an aristocratic family. A withdrawn boy is found beside his father's body holding a gun; to protect the family name his grandmother has him committed and shuts his mother away in a villa, until a former suitor and a sceptical doctor begin to pull the official version apart. Produced by Maurizio Lodi Fe' for Verona Produzioni with Universal Productions France, and released by CIC in April 1972, it belongs to the same season as Morricone's scores for Cosa avete fatto a Solange? and Chi l'ha vista morire?, and to the year of Dimensioni Sonore.

The score is built around a single theme, La ragione, il cuore, l'amore, which opens on a hushed, ambiguous introduction before settling into a rhythmic pop arrangement beneath Dell'Orso's wordless soprano. Morricone returns to it six further times across the disc, each version shifting the weight between melody and accompaniment, so that the theme gradually takes on the role of the film's unreliable memory. Around it he places a suite of four Viaggio cues: the first for dissonant strings, the second and third pastoral and lightly arranged, the fourth brisker and more agitated. The film is set in high summer, and Sollima shoots it in full daylight, so the darkness falls to the music - to Prima della rivelazione, where fragments of Beethoven's Für Elise surface inside an increasingly strained orchestral texture, to the suspended stillness of Oltre il silenzio, and to the three readings of Vita sospesa. It is a compact, coherent body of work, and one that shows how far Morricone could take the giallo template away from shock and towards something closer to melancholy.

General Music issued the original LP in 1972 (ZSLGE 55076), ten stereo tracks chosen by the composer himself. That programme reached CD for the first time in Japan in 1991 (SLCS-7245), was expanded by Dagored in 2001 on CD and vinyl (RED 135), and reappeared on Verita Note in 2006 and GDM in 2011. For this edition Beat Records has gone back to the stereo master of the original album and drawn the additional material from the mono session masters approved by Morricone for the earlier expanded releases, for a total running time of 59:34 across twenty tracks. Presented in a jewelcase with a 12-page booklet.