Carlotta Valdes

Young French jazz-fusion ensemble Ghost Rhythms arrive at TPA Towers hitherto unknown to me with their third album, a two-hour long instrumental tribute to the movie Vertigo. Intrigued by the oft-quoted synchronicity between Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and the movie The Wizard Oz, the band’s composers-in-residence Camille Petit and Xavier Gélard set out to make a synchronous alternate soundtrack to the legendary Hitchcock film. The results are as gloriously expansive and darkly cinematic as you would expect given the subject matter.

Vertigo represents the summit of the seven-picture, nine-year association between Alfred Hitchcock and legendary composer Bernard Herrmann. Using instrumental and harmonic colour as the main paints in his repertoire, Herrmann deploys brief melodic cells and minimalist techniques to explore the obsessed world of Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart), a retired detective who has fallen in love with a woman from the past. In doing so, Herrmann broke from the post-romantic aesthetic personified by Golden Age masters such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Alfred Newman. Highlights include the hypnotic, dream-like "Prelude", the churning allegro con brio of "Rooftop", the haunting love music in "Madeleine's First Appearance", a memorable habanera ("Carlotta's Portrait"), and the cathartic "Scene d'Amour", which has been compared with Wagner's "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde. Page Cook, long-time critic for Films In Review, once wrote that Muir Mathieson's performance "remains one of the greatest pieces of film music conducting ever recorded . . . every tempo, every rhythmic nuance, every dynamic inhabits the film." In other words, this is a classic film/music amalgamation that should be in every cinema lover's collection.