When after a quarter-century race Mann finally managed to reach the finish line of Ferrari, the first name chosen in the music department was that of Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, electronic experimenter known in the film field for his collaboration with the Safdie brothers. Lopatin wanted to exploit in the score the «throbbing symphony» (as the director called it) of Ferrari engines. So in fact it is also in the final score, entrusted to Daniel Pemberton. The musician (elected as the best British composer for 5 times at the World Soundtrack Awards) describes his approach to soundtracks as creating a new band every time he is hired for a job:with the will to invent different worlds for each project, knowing exactly the strength and weaknesses of each instrument at its disposal synthesizers included. In the full-bodied filmography of Pemberton stand out the monumental music for the animated trilogy of Spider-man, but we remember here his signature on a title that passed into the hands of Mann during his preparation, Gold by Stephen Gaghan (where he signs with Danger Mouse a beautiful titletrack entrusted to Iggy Pop).In the case of Ferrari, the English musician had to identify with the drivers of Ferrari and Maserati, pushing creatively on the accelerator. Taking advantage of a hole in his busy schedule he was hired by Mann to comment on the car scenes: his contribution developed such a power to push the director to entrust him with the whole film, with only seven days available for orchestrations and arrangements (starting one Thursday, the following Wednesday here he is in the recording room with the orchestra). The result is a transcendental soundtrack that acts as a vector to the emotions of the situations and the mood of the characters.
The whispering strings punctuated by female voices (that dialogue at a distance with the interventions of Lisa Gerrard) in the quiet scenes, enter into fibrillation when the engines roar, helped by percussion and spectacular entrances of brass (on the French grandprix circuit and then on the streets of the Mille Miglia). They are scenes where the seconds are fundamental, and running on the hands of a chronometer from the race the result has an extraordinary cinematography that fits like a glove to the number of cylinders and laps of racing cars, mixing«The high frequency energy of the archicon very low parts, so that the motors can become part of the score». The most convincing example is De Portago Test Drive, where the theme that will be developed in Fuel and Air and finally in Epilogue debuts, whose epic cadence can not but refer to the Trevor Jones of Mohicans.

These premises made it possible to write music capable of capturing the essence of the film,for Ferrari it was the perfect symbiosis with the director with very little time at his disposal resulting in a score that embraces the sound effects of the scenes and channels them into the best experience for the audience not getting in the way and distracting from the key moments of the film but amplifying the scenes through music.The deafening sound of the cars accompanies the heartbeat that the music seems to simulate even in reminiscences of the ElliotGoldenthal, and about direct recoveries here is Rose Moon by John Murphy (from Miami Vice), for a dialogue in front of a moka of coffee between Enzo and Lina. The most sensational return is indeed that of Gerrard and Bourke, with Lisa imposing his unmistakable priestly stamp from the first scene in the cemetery of Modena. The unpublished songs unlined for the occasion are called Paragon, Betrayed and Resistance, but a prominent role plays once again Sacrifice, revived by The Insider for a new night scene, that of Ferrari’s inspection of the place of the final massacre. Gerrard also stars in Martin Phipps and Natalie Holt’s Get Off My Land, extrapolated from the Hugo Blick The Honorable Woman miniseries (2014). As for the additional material, Mann used another collaborator from half of Dead Can Dance, the Italian based in Los Angeles Marcello De Francisci (Exaudia, 2022, was the remarkable album that ignited the interest of the director).

The repertoire remains to be mentioned: the mass of the workers in the church of San Pietro is introduced by the hymn Jesu, rex admirabilis by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, which makes room for the famous motet Ave Verum Corpus, the opera K618 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, while the shot of a starter transforms the scene into a riot of ticks, with chronometers synchronized around the track of Jean Behranel near the circuit. Before Pemberton’s elegiac Danza sull'Emilia on a panorama of misty hills, the film opens on the pulsating rhythm of the Dino Olivieri Jazz Orchestra with the voice of Renzo Mori, who accompanies the ancient victorious deeds of Enzo, until that extraordinary still image on his eyes. The song is Jungle Fever (1935), an autarchic version of Walter Donaldson’s Jungle Fever, performed by MillsBrothers in Operator 13by Richard Boleslawski. At the Teatro Storchi the illusions of healing in Paris, o cara (from La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi), resonate with the «sensory memories» of Enzo, Laura, Lina and Adalgisa. Finally, as in Collateral, Mann doubles a song between action and credits. In this case he extracts from the group of Sanremo 1957, almost live with the events, the most beautiful voice of the Italian melodic song, Jula de Palma: we find Nel Giardino del mio Cuore (Testoni-Kramer)on the love scene between Alfonso de Portago and Linda Christiane we find ourselves at the end to seal with his dreamy melancholy the last Mannish effort.

 

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