Herrmann: The Film Scores - Salonen (1996)

Bernard Herrmann

The Film Scores

Vertigo; Psycho; Marnie

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Fahrenheit 451; Torn Curtain

Taxi Driver; North By Northwest

Los Angeles Philharmonic

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Posing like Anthony Perkins in that unforgettably chilling last scene of Psycho, Maestro Salonen introduces us to the masterly scores of Bernard Herrmann. From the various amazing scores by the great film music composer, the Finnish conductor's choice is focused on Herrmann's work for many of Hitchcock's cinematic masterpieces for which he helped attain glory (excluding the soundtracks for Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and Scorsese's Taxi Driver, all of the scores here performed were written for the English director). Unfortunately Salonen leaves out another sensational score by the American Jewish composer - that for the best film ever, Welles' Citizen Kane.

Vertigo's eerie and dramatic final scene

As always with Herrmann, film music is an unfair label considering the subtlety and complexity woven into these scores. Nonetheless, this is great cinematic music. It would be impossible - for instance - to watch the long, desperate and spiralling kiss of the doomed James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo (the film I love the most) without Herrmann's sensual, late romantic, love theme, or to merely recall the horrific shower scene in Psycho without thinking of the screaming strings of the knife motif...

Esa-Pekka Salonen shapes the sophisticated sound of the Los Angeles Philharmonic into a prism of sonic beauty. Noticeably, the music of Herrmann (although a New Yorker by birth) is for this outstanding orchestra, what Brahms' or Mozart's are for the Wiener Philharmoniker or Beethoven's is for the Berliner.

Bernard Herrmann Society's review for the album and the benefit concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion with the same programme, here.

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