Bernard Herrmann: Suite from Wuthering Heights; Echoes for Strings (Chandos)
★★☆☆☆
The history of Hollywood film music runs in a fairly straight line from Erich Wolfgang Korngold to John Williams, offering a colourful blend of Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Puccini and Prokofiev. The historical line is as unwavering as it is untrue. While mainstream movie composers relied on much the same materials, some spun off into a different sound world, creating a satellite narrative of screen sound.
The most original rethinker of film sound was the New York composer Bernard Herrmann. He was just 30 when he won his first Oscar for The Devil and Daniel Webster in 1941, and then he went to work with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane. When not composing for film he was conducting concerts on the CBS network, choosing modern symphonies of considerable obscurity by Miaskovsky, Malipiero and Edmund Rubbra. He gave the broadcast premiere of Charles Ives’s third symphony.
Fifteen years would pass before he found his true vocation in film, working with Alfred Hitchcock on movies of ever-mounting horror starting with Vertigo and North by Northwest and leading to Psycho, The Birds and Marnie.
Herrmann created a restless sense of anxiety in Hitchcock films by using short bowings across a very large strings section. His rhythm owed much to Stravinsky and his melodies to Hindemith. Wagner and Scriabin supplied erotic hints where required. These towering influences aside, Herrmann was a genuine original whose scores can be recognised within ten seconds.
He was vastly respected When Hitchcock fired him for refusing to write jazz, an international protest was led by none less than the French director Francois Truffaut, for whom Herrmann went on to compose Fahrenheit 451. John Williams worked for him for some months.
Weary of Hollywood, Hermann migrated to London, where he died in his mid-60s. He left a large body of concert music that seldom gets heard and the prospect of discovering an opera he wrote in the 1940s on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was distinctly tantalising.
Unfortunately, this premiere recording is a disappointment. The music is at once dappled and derivative, with undertones of Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. The textures are too light by half, and there is a dearth of dark foreboding. Roderick Williams and Keri Fuge sing the solo parts; Mario Venzago conducts the Singapore Symphony Orchestra for what seems like a very long time. I ran screaming back to Herrmann’s recording of Psycho: now, there’s a real concert score.
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