Music Arcades: Carmine Coppola, Nino Rota, Francesco Pennino: The Godfather Suite

This is pretty much what it says on the tin (subtitle: Music Featured in the Godfather Trilogy), though not the same performances that were used on the soundtracks of the three films. Carmine Coppola (Francis's dad, and, Wikipedia tells me, once first flautist for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra) conducts the Milan Philharmonic Orchestra playing pieces by himself, Nino Rota and Francesco Pennino (who coincidentally was also Francis's grandfather).

Which begs the question of how Nino Rota was related to the Coppola family. My brief Google genealogy hasn't found a link, but it was Rota who was the main draw for me on this CD. He wrote the themes that will make you think Godfather as soon as you hear them. Though I see there was some controversy about him plagiarising his own earlier work on another film for one theme (don't you find all soundtrack composers repeatedly regurgitate the same stuff in slightly different clothes?): this led to him forfeiting an oscar for The Godfather, but winning an oscar — repeating the same theme once more — for The Godfather Part II.

The pieces composed by Carmine Coppola seem to be mainly for the formal occasions: a procession in Part II and the wedding scenes in the first film. The CD notes observe that these "pieces [are] now used extensively in Italo-American weddings", and it's hard not to picture those Italo-American fathers of the bride — some of whom, statistically speaking, will be short and little on the pudgy side — puffing themselves up under their tuxedos and playing the Brando patriarch for a few hours. And I mean that most affectionately; please leave all horses undecaptitated.

I've never seen Part III, so poor was its reputation. I liked the first two, but I thought my friend Gill and her partner went a little far when they called their son Michael after Corleone Jr. He doesn't come out of it too well, as I remember. Nino would have been a less loaded alternative (and probably more common in some parts of Sheffield).

[Update, 3 November 2009: until Sunday you can hear Russell Davies giving some backstory to the Godfather songwriting, and playing Al Martino singing to a Nino Rota tune, on his always-impressive radio show.]