Lalo Schifrin obituary

The Guardian

27-06-2025

The career of the composer and conductor Lalo Schifrin, who has died aged 93, was incomparably rich and varied, spanning musical genres from jazz and classical to Latin American, funk, rock and avant garde. He conducted (among others) the London Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and composed music ranging from piano concertos and symphonies to an album of songs in the Aztec language for the tenor Plácido Domingo.
When the Three Tenors staged their historic inaugural concert on the eve of the football World Cup final in Rome in 1990, it was Schifrin who created the musical arrangements, the first of his four collaborations with them. The recording of the event was declared to be the bestselling classical album of all time.
But even if he had done none of this, Schifrin would have become a household name for his work as a composer of film and TV scores. He created a catalogue that places him alongside such renowned names in the field as John Barry, Michel Legrand or Ennio Morricone. His best-known composition was his thrillingly dramatic theme for Mission: Impossible, but he was also responsible for the soundtracks of four of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry films, and supplied musical backings for films starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
His music for Peter Yates's Bullitt (1968), set in San Francisco, brilliantly fused a tense rhythm track with stark brass interpolations, jazzy electric guitar and hair-raising strings, crystallising the film's aura of mystery and danger. It was a key moment in cementing the legend of its star, Steve McQueen, as the King of Cool.
Schifrin, having already written music for the spy series The Man from UNCLE, originally devised the famous Mission: Impossible theme for its TV incarnation, which premiered on the CBS network on 17 September 1966 (coincidentally, this was within days of the launch of both The Monkees and Star Trek). Its throbbing rhythm instantly oozed danger and menace, and Schifrin built the tension with hectic Latin-flavoured percussion, blaring counterpointed brass and a solo flute. Its unusual 5/4 time signature helped to lodge it in the listener's brain. Appropriately for a show about secret agents, the theme's motif of two long beats followed by two short beats spells the letters 'M' and 'I' in Morse code. M:I's producer Bruce Geller subsequently commissioned Schifrin to write the music for his detective series Mannix.
When Mission: Impossible was reborn as a film franchise in the 1990s, with Tom Cruise in the lead role of Ethan Hunt, Schifrin's work was part of the package. A dancefloor version of his theme tune by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen from U2, coinciding with the 1996 Mission: Impossible film, reached the Top 10 in the UK and the US, and future film releases would feature reworkings of Schifrin's compositions by composers such as Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe.
Schifrin was born in Buenos Aires. His father, Luis, was Jewish and his mother, Clara (nee Ester), a Catholic, and the young Lalo attended services in both faiths. Luis was a violinist and concertmaster with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic at the Teatro Colón. Lalo described Clara, who also came from a musical family, as 'a great mother, a great housewife'. He began playing the piano when he was five, and studied with Enrique Barenboim, father of the conductor and concert pianist Daniel Barenboim.
Later he was taught by the Ukrainian pianist Andreas Karalis, and tutored in harmony by the Argentinian composer Juan Carlos Paz. However, in his teens he was dazzled by jazz when he heard records brought in by his classmates at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. He described hearing Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as 'like a religious conversion … it was the road to Damascus'.
He went on to study law and sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, but at 22 he won a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. After studying with the French composers Olivier Messiaen and Charles Koechlin by day, he played jazz in Paris clubs at night, and also wrote musical arrangements for French record labels. His earnings enabled him to rent his own apartment rather than living in student lodgings.
When he returned to Buenos Aires in 1956, he was invited to form a jazz big band for radio and TV work. After he attended a concert at the US embassy by Gillespie and the all-star State Department band, he performed with his own orchestra at a dinner for Gillespie. The latter invited him to come to the US, and by 1958 he had acquired a green card and was living in New York. He composed a suite, Gillespiana, and recorded it with Gillespie's band for the Verve label. According to Schifrin, it sold a million copies. He spent three years as the pianist in Gillespie's ensemble, writing another suite for him, The New Continent (1962). He also became a composer and arranger for Verve, working with artists including Stan Getz and Sarah Vaughan. Verve's parent company was the movie giant MGM, and in 1963 Schifrin, with his wife Donna, moved to Los Angeles to write film scores. He made his Hollywood debut with Rhino! (1964), a drama about endangered white rhinos in Africa. It was the start of an astonishingly prolific career in film and television that would stretch without interruption into the 21st century.
Schifrin's music accompanied a string of landmark cinema releases, including the McQueen vehicle The Cincinatti Kid (1965), Cool Hand Luke (with Newman, 1967), Richard Lester's period swashbuckler The Four Musketeers, and the second world war dramas Hell in the Pacific (1968) and The Eagle Has Landed (1976). He added shivering creepiness to The Amityville Horror (1979), and tackled the Redford prison drama Brubaker (1980) and cold war thriller The Fourth Protocol (1987).
Schifrin also virtually became Eastwood's personal soundtrack provider. A jazz aficionado himself, Eastwood evidently felt a natural bond with the composer. Their partnership began with Coogan's Bluff (1968), and included Dirty Harry (1971) and three subsequent Dirty Harry instalments, as well as The Beguiled (1971) and Joe Kidd (1972). Don Siegel, director of Dirty Harry, also hired Schifrin for his films Charlie Varrick (1973) and Telefon (1977).
In the 1990s, Schifrin began releasing his series of albums under the banner of Jazz Meets the Symphony. These featured orchestral arrangements of pieces by such titans of jazz as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and his mentor Gillespie, while also essaying jazzified versions of pieces by Mozart, Bach or Puccini. In 1998 he wrote the score for the buddy-cops comedy Rush Hour, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, and the soundtrack album reached No 5 on the US charts. Schifrin also scored the two follow-up films in the Rush Hour series. He composed the score for the horror movie Abominable (2006), directed by his son Ryan Schifrin, and released the recording of it on his own Aleph label.
In April 2025, Schifrin's last major work made its debut at the Teatro Colón. This was Long Live Freedom, a 35-minute symphony written with a fellow Argentinian composer, Rod Schejtman, and dedicated to their homeland.
Schifrin won five Grammy awards, and was nominated for Oscars on six occasions. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, presented by Eastwood. In 2008, he published his autobiography, Mission Impossible: My Life in Music.
He is survived by his wife, Donna (nee Cockrell), whom he married in 1971, and who managed his business affairs and record label, and their son, Ryan; and by two children, William and Frances, from his first marriage, to Sylvia Schor, which ended in divorce.
Lalo (Boris Claudio) Schifrin, composer, musician and conductor, born 21 June 1932; died 26 June 2025