Lalo Schifrin - Theme from Mission: Impossible (Live at the Concert of the Americas) (Dec. 25, 1994)

Boris Claudio "Lalo" Schifrin (born June 21, 1932)[1] is an Argentine-American pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor. He is best known for his large body of film and TV scores since the 1950s, incorporating jazz and Latin American musical elements alongside traditional orchestrations. He is a five-time Grammy Award winner; he has been nominated for six Academy Awards and four Emmy Awards.
Schifrin's best known compositions include the "Theme from Mission: Impossible", as well as the scores to Cool Hand Luke (1967), Bullitt (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Enter the Dragon (1973), The Four Musketeers (1974), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979), and the Rush Hour trilogy (1998-2007). Schifrin is also noted for his collaborations with Clint Eastwood from the late 1960s to the 1980s, particularly the Dirty Harry series of films. He composed the Paramount Pictures fanfare used from 1976 to 2004.
In 2019, he received an honorary Oscar "in recognition of his unique musical style, compositional integrity and influential contributions to the art of film scoring."
Early life
Schifrin was born in Buenos Aires to a Jewish family.[2] His father, Luis Schifrin, led the second violin section of the orchestra at the Teatro Colón for three decades.[1] At the age of six, Schifrin began a six-year course of study on piano with Enrique Barenboim, the father of pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. Lalo Schifrin shares a familial link to American alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin. Schifrin began studying piano with the Greek-Russian expatriate Andreas Karalis, former head of the Kyiv Conservatory, and harmony with Argentine composer Juan Carlos Paz. During this time Schifrin also became interested in jazz.
Although Schifrin studied sociology and law at the University of Buenos Aires, it was music that captured his attention.[1] At age 20, he successfully applied for a scholarship to the Conservatoire de Paris. At night, he played jazz in the Paris clubs. In 1955, Schifrin played piano with Argentine bandoneon giant Ástor Piazzolla and represented his country at the International Jazz Festival in Paris.
"Theme from Mission: Impossible" is the theme tune of the TV series Mission: Impossible (1966-1973). The theme was written and composed by Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin and has since gone on to appear in several other works of the Mission: Impossible franchise, including the 1988 TV series, the film series, and the video game series.
Overview
The theme is written in a 5
4 time signature, which Schifrin has jokingly explained as being "for people who have five legs".[1][2] Schifrin started from the Morse code for M.I. which is "_ _ .."; if a dot is one beat and a dash is one and a half beats, then this gives a bar of five beats, exactly matching the underlying rhythm.[3] Schifrin's working title for the song was "Burning Fuse."[4] Schifrin compared his writing process to writing a letter: "When you write a letter, you don’t have to think what grammar or what syntaxes you’re going to use, you just write a letter. And that’s the way it came." He estimated that he wrote it in about three minutes.[2][4]
The actor Martin Landau, who played the character Rollin Hand on the show, attended the recording session for the theme song. "Lalo raised his wand to the musicians and I heard 'dun dun, da da, dun dun, da da' for the first time, and it was deafening," Landau recalled. "Lalo interrupted the band and said, 'no, no, it should be like this.' They resumed and before we could say anything, they had recorded it. I was stunned. It was so perfect. I came out humming that tune."[4]
Reception
The original single release peaked at number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 and 19 on the magazine's Adult Contemporary chart in 1967. Also in that year, two years before Leonard Nimoy began playing the role of Paris in Mission Impossible, the theme appeared on the album Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock's Music From Outer Space (Nimoy did not perform on the song).[5]
Awards
The theme won for the Best Instrumental Theme at the 10th Grammy Awards held on February 29, 1968.[6][7]
Schifrin's version, as performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance for the 39th Grammy Awards held in 1997. The Clayton and Mullen version was also nominated for the same award in the same edition.[8]

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