While Nino Rota may be best remembered for his score for Francis Coppola’s The Godfather, those with a knowledge of the history of cinema – and those with a taste for memorable film scores – will be well aware that Rota’s most famous work was that he undertook for the director Federico Fellini, and the most iconic of these scores was for La Dolce Vita. The score’s curious mixture of the popular and the wistfully symphonic is absolutely unique, and is utterly characteristic of both the composer and the films of the director with whom he had such a profitable association. This new disc captures every note of the score (including some source music) and it is very pleasing. Sprawling across the Totalscope screen in all its episodic glory, Fellini’s epic essay on Italian morality is a vast, uneven work, which created a seismic division in critical opinion that persists to this day, although the striking of a new print in 2004 resulted in a slew of unalloyedly enthusiastic reviews. And the score is key.

La Dolce Vita (Cam)