November 4, 1992 | Oscar-winning composer Maurice Jarre vividly remembers the final phone call he received from his great friend and frequent collaborator, Sir David Lean.

''I knew he had been sick,'' Jarre said during a recent interview. ''But when I asked him how we was feeling, he said, 'Great, great. I'm a little weak -- but we have to talk about Nostromo.''

Nostromo, an epic drama based on Joseph Conrad's classic novel, was to be the fifth Lean film for which Jarre would provide a musical score. The 67-year-old composer had previously earned Academy Awards for scoring Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India, and a Japanese Film Award for Lean's Ryan's Daughter.

For Nostromo, a long-cherished dream project for Lean, ''He told me 'We should have a theme for greed,''' Jarre said. ''Because, for him, Nostromo is basically the story of greed, and how it ruins everything. So he wanted the theme for this concept -- not for a character.

''But he also told me, 'Maurice, you should be very free this time.' Because, sometimes, in his indications for the concept of the music, he was very specific. But for this time, he said, 'You should be very free.'

''He had a very weak voice, but he was very excited… He was 82 years old, but his intellectual acuity was unbelievable. He was joking, he never really lost his sense of humor.''

Three days later, Sir David Lean was dead.

Still, as playwright Robert Anderson once noted, death ends a life, but not a relationship. Even as he continues to thrive in international cinema -– Only the Lonely, School Ties and the forthcoming Solar Crisis are among his most recent film scoring credits -- Jarre still feels bound to the filmmaker he credits for giving him ''a second birthday'' as a composer.

Maurice Jarre's Musical Tribute to David Lean, a 57-minute video directed by Larry Johnson (Woodstock), is an ambitious and impressive commingling of music and movie artistry. Filmed during an August 1991 performance in London, the tribute has Jarre conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert of his music from Lean's masterworks, accompanied by appropriate clips from the films.

The video was greeted with a standing ovation at the 1992 Montreal World Film Festival, where it received its world premiere as the centerpiece of a festival tribute to Jarre. It will not be released on VHS tape and laserdisc until next week, but the soundtrack already is available on CD and cassette from Milan Records.

The morning after the Montreal Festival premiere, Jarre explained that he personally chose all the film clips for the London concert. ''Not to make a resume of the story of the films,'' he said in his heavily-accented English, ''but to give a feeling of what each film was about.''

For one particular clip, featuring actress Judy Davis in a tense sequence from Passage to India, Jarre goes one step further, demonstrating the meticulous precision of his craft. The video shows Jarre at the podium paying as much attention to the clock as to the orchestra, so that each specific segment of his score is performed just long enough, at exactly the right moment, to match the emotions of Lean's images.

According to director Johnson, Musical Tribute was produced on a $280,000 budget. ''One music video that Madonna would do costs more than what we did,'' Johnson said. ''And we did it in a foreign country, with a full orchestra -- and a lot of film clips, which did not come cheap.''

''And the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is not cheap, either,'' Jarre added with a laugh.

Jarre, a Malibu resident and naturalized U.S. citizen, is a Lyon native who began his work of underscoring drama with France's Jean-Louis Barrault Company. He later became musical director of the French National Theater, a position he held for 12 years.

Filmmaker Georges Franju introduced him to film scoring by hiring Jarre to write music for the 1951 short Hotel des Invalides. Ten years later, Jarre made his first major international impression with his score for the French classic Sundays and Cybele.

''For that film,'' Jarre said, ''I wrote a simple score for three instruments. And there were only about 10 minutes of music in the entire film.''

But that was enough to attract the attention of producer Sam Spiegel, who was looking for composers for his upcoming epic, Lawrence of Arabia.

Jarre recalled that, initially, Spiegel wanted three different composers from three different countries for the film. (''And I thought, 'Wow! That is an American production!' '') When that plan fell through, Spiegel decided to split the scoring duties between Jarre and Broadway great Richard Rodgers.

''The first time I met David,'' Jarre said, ''was when he and I and Sam Spiegel were in a London studio, listening to a pianist play the music that Rodgers had written (in America) . . . The pianist began by playing the main theme, and then something called, if you can believe it, 'Love Theme for Lawrence of Arabia.'''

Lean was not amused. ''Sam,'' the director snapped at his producer, ''what is this rubbish?''

Anxious, and not a little embarrassed, Spiegel turned to Jarre and demanded that Jarre perform some of his own music. So Jarre sat at the piano, and began with ''what we now know as the theme for Lawrence of Arabia,'' the composer said.

''I had my back to them, so I could not see how they were reacting. But right in the middle of my playing, I felt a hand on my shoulder. And I could hear David saying, 'Sam, this young chap has exactly what I want.'''

So Jarre wound up writing all the music for the Oscar-winning epic. Since then, he has enjoyed international success with many other directors on such diverse projects as The Collector, The Longest Day, The Damned, The Man Who Would Be King, The Tin Drum, Witness, Dead Poet's Society, Ghost and Jacob's Ladder.

''But I still have the print of David's hand on my shoulder,'' Jarre said. ''You keep that all your life.''