This soundtrack just really holds up. It’s still just a pleasure. The soundtrack isn’t very long, right about forty minutes, so it moves at a brisk pace. It’s divided between the orchestral “film-score-in-the-classical-style” of Nino Rota and the somewhat more off-beat, Italian-folk inspired pieces by Carmine Coppola. Many of the latter are diegetic within the film, not strictly speaking film score. The Murder of Don Fanucci, for example, is the parade music that’s going on in the street as Vito stalks Fanucci through the street festival. Personally, I prefer the Rota tracks which are really beautiful, catchy in a melodic way, and pretty melancholy, but I don’t begrudge the Coppola tracks because they actually work very well at breaking up the score tracks and the album feels fresher and less predictable because of them. The themes are really fantastic, of course, and the way Rota is able to weave together very different themes into one piece of music is often really fantastic. The End Title is really amazing; at only four minutes, it manages to weave in everything from the melancholy Immigrant theme to the bouncy Tarantella and then segue to brooding dread and then back to sweeping romanticism. The fact that some of these tracks work despite that kind of epic sweep is testament to just how strong these themes are. Like the movie it goes with, it does, in my opinion, surpass the original; it’s a deeper score, I think, than the original Godfather. Not that that one’s bad either. They’re both really strong. But this one comes highly recommended. 4 stars.
tl;dr – great movie inspires a magnificent score which shares soundtrack space with some interesting Italian-folk music; a brisk, beautiful, melancholy and dark work of thematic brilliance. 4 stars.