Herrmann, B.: Film Music

This CD presents two of Bernard Herrmann's classic film scores from early in his career. They have been arranged from the original manuscripts by Stephen Hogger and played by the BBC Philharmonic led by a conductor who has become a leading light in film score recordings, Rumon Gamba. Everything about this production is first-class. The booklet notes by Günther Kögebehn are exemplary and I have borrowed from them for this review.

'Hangover Square' (1944) came on the heels of a movie that had been a big hit, 'The Lodger', starring Laird Cregar. 'Hangover Square', although taken from an unrelated novel by Patrick Hamilton, was massively rewritten to imitate 'The Lodger' and to accommodate the early 1940s fad (following the unexpected success of the 'Warsaw Concerto' in the film 'Dangerous Moonlight') of featuring a piano concerto, in this case played by the lead character, George Harvey Bone. Bone was a composer/pianist who had a Jekyll/Hyde personality and who, when insane, is an arsonist. The climax of the movie has him playing the première of his concerto after having set fire to the concert hall. The final pages of the concerto are played in the inferno after everyone, including the orchestra, has gotten out safely. As a result this concerto is probably the only one ever written that ends with the piano playing alone! The music for the film is among the eeriest ever written for a movie. It certainly sets forth the weird character of George Harvey Bone.

'Citizen Kane', of course, has in many surveys been called the greatest movie ever made in America. It was the brainchild of the boy wonder, Orson Welles, and the music score was Bernard Herrmann's first for the movies. In New York he had been a part of Welles' team for The Mercury Theater of the Air (the group that broadcast the notorious dramatization of 'The War of the Worlds' that set off a panic because listeners thought it was an actual newscast) and he had come west with Welles when the director was to make his first film. Of course Welles used him to score 'Citizen Kane'. Of many notable things in the score, two stand out: the use of a variant of the 'Dies Irae' in its opening measures, Herrmann's way of foreshadowing the ultimate course of the film, and the music Herrmann wrote for Kane's soprano wife, Susan, in her failed effort to become an opera star. In the latter case Herrmann wrote that he had to write music for a singer who wasn't awful but who clearly didn't have what it took to be a great diva. He did this by using a lyric soprano singing music that was intentionally a bit too high and too heavy for her light voice, a device that works brilliantly.

These performances are spectacularly good. Martin Roscoe, the fine British pianist, is the soloist in the piano concerto from 'Hangover Square' and soprano Orla Boylan sings in the 'Citizen Kane' operatic music.

Strong recommendation.

Scott Morrison