by The career of the composer and conductor Lalo Schifrin, who died at the age of 93, was incomparably rich and varied and tensioned musical genres of jazz and classic to Latin American, radio, rock and avant garde. He led the London Symphony Orchestra, the Viennese Symphony Orchestra, the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and composed music that is enough for the tenor -playoCIDO -DOM language to an album in the Aztec language.
When the three tenors organized their historical opening concert in Rome on the eve of the Football World Cup in Rome in 1990, Schifrin created the musical arrangements, the first of his four cooperation with them. The admission of the event was declared the best -selling classic album ever.
But even if he hadn’t done anything, Schifrin would have been a well -known name for his work as a composer of film and TV results. He created a catalog that places him in the field of such renowned names as John Barry, Michel Legrand or Ennio Morricone. His best-known composition was his exciting dramatic topic for mission: impossible, but he was also responsible for the soundtracks of four dirty Harry films dirty by Clint Eastwoods and supplied musical setbacks for films with Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
His music for Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968), who plays in San Francisco, brilliantly merged a tense rhythm track with strong brass interpolations, jazzy electric guitar and hair preparations and crystallized the aura of the film of the mystery and the risk of film. It was an important moment to consolidate the legend of his star Steve McQueen as a King of Cool.
Schifrin, who has already written music for the spy series The Man From Uncle, originally developed the famous mission: Impossible topic for his TV incarnation, which had its premiere on September 17, 1966 in the CBS network (this happened to be the start of The Monkees and Star Trek). His throbbing rhythm immediately won the danger and threat, and Schifrin built the tension with hectic Latin percussion, baking brass and a solo flute. The unusual 5/4 time signature has contributed to inserting it in the listener’s brain. Appropriate for a show about secret agents are the motif of the topic of two long blows, followed by two short beats, the letters “M” and “I” in Morse code. M: The producer of I’s Bruce Geller commissioned that Schifrin wrote music for his Detective series Mannix.
As a mission: Impossible was born as a film franchise in the 1990s, Schifrin’s work was part of the package. A dance floor version of his topic Tunes by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen from U2, which coincides with the mission: Impossible film from 1996, reached the top 10 in the UK and the US Contain balfe.
Schifrin was born in Buenos Aires. His father Luis was Jewish and his mother Clara (born Ester), a Catholic, and the young Lalo visited services in both beliefs. Luis was violinist and concert champion at the Buenos Aires Philharmonic in the Teatro Colón. Lalo described Clara, who also came from a music family, as “a great mother, a great housewife”. He started playing the piano at the age of five and studied at Enrique Barenboim, the father of the conductor and concert pianist Daniel Barenboim.
Later he was taught by the Ukrainian pianist Andreas Karalis and taught in harmony by the Argentine composer Juan Carlos Paz. In his teenagers, however, he was needed by jazz when he heard records brought in by his classmates in the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. He described how Louis Armstrong, fat Waller, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie heard “like a religious conversion … the street to Damascus”.
He studied law and sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, but won a scholarship for the Paris Conservatory at 22. After studying with the French composer Olivier Messiaen and Charles Koechlin during the day, he played jazz in Paris clubs at night and also wrote musical arrangements for French record labels. His income enabled him to rent his own apartment instead of living in student accommodations.
When he returned to Buenos Aires in 1956, he was invited to form a jazz -big band for radio and TV work. After participating in a concert in the US message of 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 USA, and in 1958 he had acquired a Green Card and lived in New York. He composed a suite, Gillespiana, and recorded it with Gillespies band for the Verve label. According to Schifrin, it sold a million copies. He spent three years as a pianist in Gillespies Ensemble and wrote another suite for him, the new continent (1962). He also became a composer and arranger for Verve and worked with artists such as Stan Getz and Sarah Vaughan. Verve’s parent company was the film giant MGM, and in 1963 Schifrin moved to Los Angeles with his wife Donna to write film scores. He gave his Hollywood debut with Rhino! (1964), a drama about endangered white rhinos in Africa. It was the beginning of an amazingly productive career in the film and on television, which would extend without interruption of the 21st century.
Schifrin’s music accompanied a number of pioneering cinema publications, including the McQueen vehicle The Cincinatti Kid (1965), Cool Hand Luke (with Newman, 1967), Richard Lester Period Swashbuckler The Four Musketiere, and the Second World War Dramas Hell in the Pacific (1968) and Eagle (1976). He added the Amityville Horror (1979) trembling creepiness and started with the Redford prison -Drama Brubaker (1980) and the Cold War Driller of the Fourth Protocol (1987).
Schifrin also became practically Eastwood’s personal soundtrack provider. Eastwood, a jazz lover himself, obviously felt a natural connection to the composer. Her partnership began with Coogans Bluff (1968) and included Dirty Harry (1971) and three subsequent Dirty Harry rates as well as the Beguilen (1971) and Joe Kidd (1972). Don Siegel, director of Dirty Harry, also hired Schifrin for his films Charlie Varrick (1973) and Telephone (1977).
In the 1990s, Schifrin began to publish his series of albums under the banner of Jazz meets The Symphony. These showed orchestral pieces by Titans of Jazz like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and his mentor Gillespie, while they were also commissioned jazz versions of pieces by Mozart, Bach or Puccini. In 1998 he wrote the score for the Comedy Rush Hour of the Buddy Cops with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, and Soundtrack album reached No. 5 in the US charts. Schifrin also achieved the two follow-up films in the Rush Hour series. He composed the score for the horror film hideous (2006) directed by his son Ryan Schifrin and published the recording on his own Aleph label.
In April 2025, Schifrin’s last big work made her debut in the Teatro Colón. This was long Live Freedom, a 35-minute symphony that was written with an Argentine colleague, Rod Schejtman, and dedicated to her homeland.
Schifrin won five Grammy prices and was nominated for Oscars for six occasions. In 2018 he received an honorary co -car for lifelong services presented by Eastwood. In 2008 he published his autobiography Mission Impossible: My Life in Music.
He is survived by his wife Donna (born Cockrell), whom he married in 1971 and who led his business matters and his record label and her son Ryan; And of two children, William and Frances, from his first marriage to Sylvia Schor, who ended in divorce.
• Lalo (Boris Claudio) Schifrin, composer, musician and conductor, born on June 21, 1932; died on June 26, 2025
