Music for ALFRED HITCHCOCK
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Music for ALFRED HITCHCOCK BERNARD HERRMANN 1 The Man Who Knew Too Much: Concert Overture (1956; ed. Mauceri)* 1:57 FRANZ WAXMAN 2 Rebecca: Suite (1940; ed. Mauceri) 8:22 Rear Window: Suite (1954; ed. Mauceri) 9:20 3 I Prelude 2:14 4 II Lisa – Intermezzo 3:10 5 III Ballet 1:46 6 IV Lisa – Finale 2:10 DIMITRI TIOMKIN 7 Strangers on a Train: Suite (1951; ed. Mauceri)* 8:39 8 Dial M for Murder: Suite (1954; ed. Mauceri)* 7:47 BERNARD HERRMANN Vertigo (1958) 9:32 9 Prelude 2:58 10 Scène d’Amour 6:46 11 North by Northwest: main titles (1959) 2:47 12 Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra (1960/1968; restored and ed. Mauceri)* 15:42 ARTHUR BENJAMIN 13 The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Storm Clouds – Cantata (1934; arr. Herrmann, 1956) 9:33 DANNY ELFMAN 14 Hitchcock: Music from the End Credits (2012) 4:50 *FIRST RECORDINGS THE MUSIC OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK by John Mauceri Directors don’t write music, of course. They hire composers. They collaborate with composers. They make demands on composers. And they can fire composers. Alfred Hitchcock was not a composer, and yet because of his intense understanding of the crucial partnership between the cinematic image and the aura created by music, he was the enabling partner of the composers who created hundreds of Live recording made on 23 and 24 November 2012 in DR Koncerthuset, The Concert Hall, Copenhagen hours of important orchestral music that remain a major legacy of the twentieth century. His profound Recording producer: Bernhard Güttler importance as a film-maker is bound to the musical world that informs his films. He knew that cinema Recording engineer: Jan Oldrup and music create an alchemy of experience and that each story requires a unique music to tell that story. Editing and mastering: Bernhard Güttler It is therefore not surprising that this CD should include music of many styles, and all of it representative Musical assistant to John Mauceri: Michael Dwinell, with Chris Heckman, Mark Haas and Aaron Shows of the most important composers who worked in the medium. The music here is romantic, grotesque, Orchestral producer: Curt Kollavik Jensen humorous, terrifying, glamorous, atonal, jazzy, Baroque, epic and intimate, tender and violent. Co-ordination for DNSO: Hans Sørensen Several of Hitchock’s composers were men who escaped the horrors of war and revolution in Europe and Russia, came to America and triumphed in the burgeoning world of cinema music, and Booklet texts by John Mauceri and John Riley died as American citizens. Design and layout: Paul Brooks, [email protected] Rebecca 2]required a darkly romantic score and Franz Waxman, trained in Germany’s major Executive producer: Martin Anderson conservatories, was exactly the right composer to create that aural world. Waxman was also a jazz musician and played in a Jewish jazz-band in Berlin. So he also provided the pop/jazz score for Rear TOCC 0241 P Window 3–6, one of Hitchcock’s most revolutionary films – because all the music is meant to © 2014, Toccata Classics, London 2014, Toccata Classics, London emanate from the windows of New York apartments and thus represents art-music disguised as the music of everyday Americans in the 1950s. The two scores by the Russian-born Dimitri Tiomkin juxtapose styles in a way that that perfectly matches the requirements of the stories. Strangers on a Train 7 tells a tale of a professional tennis- player and a psychotic fan. The score includes Gershwin-like jazz (Tiomkin had played the solo part in the European premiere of Gershwin’s Concerto in F at the Paris Opéra in 1928), predatory evil, passionate romanticism and fugal writing in the style of Bach. Tiomkin’s personal training and experience made this range of styles natural to him. He knew the Russian masters well and had been a Toccata Classics CDs are also available in the shops and can be ordered from our distributors around student of Glazunov in St Petersburg. He loved American ragtime music, which he first encountered the world, a list of whom can be found at www.toccataclassics.com. If we have no representation in your as a student. He studied in Berlin with the futurist composer-teacher Ferruccio Busoni. Busoni country, please contact: Toccata Classics, 16 Dalkeith Court, Vincent Street, London SW1P 4HH, UK is famous for his Bach transcriptions, and so it is natural that Tiomkin saw the fugue, which is a Tel: +44/0 207 821 5020 E-mail: [email protected] problem-solving musical process, as a perfect way to underscore the solving of a mystery. 2 19 The strong, straightforward musical personality of the DNSO has its roots in its close links with This stylistic generosity becomes even more important in his score to Dial M for Murder 8. Like Danish and other Nordic music. The Orchestra is the leading Carl Nielsen orchestra in the world, and Waxman, who created the beautiful ‘Lisa’ theme as a metaphor for Grace Kelly in Rear Window, Tiomkin often takes Nielsen’s music on tours abroad. The leading contemporary Scandinavian symphonist, Per gives Miss Kelly an elegant and beautiful waltz, but surrounds that music with a Russian monumentality Nørgård, has had most of his symphonies premiered by the DNSO. Nørgård is, moreover, the only and a truly terrifying expansion of Mussorgsky’s musical depiction of murder and guilt in the opera Boris ‘honorary member’ of the Orchestra. Godunov. Once again, the solving of the crime is accompanied by a hardworking fugue and brings the The DNSO tours both at home and abroad. In recent years it has performed in China and Korea story to a stirring conclusion. and played in Europe’s finest concert halls – the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Musikverein Only Steven Spielberg’s partnership with John Williams and that of Tim Burton with Danny Elfman and Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Philharmonia in Berlin and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in equal Hitchcock’s relationship with Bernard Herrmann, whose Vertigo remains the longest score to any Paris – and has appeared at festivals like the Proms, the Salzburg Festival and Prague Spring. It has Hitchcock film. The opening music 9 is a rondo that alternates between circles of competing harmonies recorded innumerable CDs for such labels as Dacapo, Decca, Chandos and EMI, receiving awards for in contrary motion, punctuated with unpredictable and roaring brass notes that make one feel as if the its recordings from all over the world. floor has just dropped, and a descending motif that crashes like a tidal wave of obsession, which is the The Danish National Symphony Orchestra gives 70 concerts per year. The weekly Thursday energy that fuels the story. This obsession theme becomes the Scène d’Amour A sequence. Based on the Concerts are a unique concert series that has taken place since 1932. Every week these concerts are Wagnerian DNA of Liebestod, its repeated call-and-answer perfectly expresses the trap of compulsive- broadcast live by Danish Radio and many of them are transmitted on TV as well. obsessive behaviour. Psycho is scored only for string instruments and makes use of every technique in playing those instruments – arco, pizzicato, muted, tremolo, harmonics, col legno battuta, etc. – to create a world of black-and-white terror. It is perhaps Herrmann’s major achievement because it is so controlled and so inventive. Although the score was completed in 1960, Herrmann revisited this music while living in London, and created from it a single orchestral work, A Narrative for String Orchestra C, in 1968. It had to wait until 1999, the Hitchcock centenary year, for its first concert performance, which took place in Los Angeles with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. The Man Who Knew Too Much is a rare example of Hitchcock remaking a movie, and so it simultaneously represents his early, London, period (1934) and embraces his Hollywood years. Herrmann composed the score to this later (1956) version but chose to keep the original 1934 cantata, composed by Arthur Benjamin, and expand it for the big-screen colour version that starred James Stewart and Doris Day. Benjamin’s score is very much of the school of Vaughan Williams and with the Herrmann expansion it becomes even more epic than in its much shorter original D. Come and explore unknown music with us by joining the Toccata Discovery Club. Membership brings Danny Elfman’s score to Sacha Gervasi’s 2012 biopic Hitchcock, based on the filming of Psycho, brings you two free CDs, big discounts on all Toccata Classics recordings and Toccata Press books, early ordering this disc into the 21st century. Elfman has often said that it was the music of Bernard Herrmann that first on all Toccata releases and a host of other benefits, for a modest annual fee of £20. You start saving as soon inspired him to become a composer for the cinema. In these excerpts from his score to Hitchcock E, as you join. You can sign up online at the Toccata Classics website at www.toccataclassics.com. one feels the subtle control of harmonies and colours as well as the distension of melodic materials of a Herrmann score, translated through the prism of Elfman’s unique expression of sadness and longing. 18 3 edited, supervised and conducted numerous Bernstein works throughout the world, many of them ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND HIS COMPOSERS premieres, at the invitation of the composer. by John Riley For sixteen seasons at the Hollywood Bowl, Mr Mauceri broke all records by leading over For some film-makers the arrival of synchronised sound was a traumatic experience.