National PO Bernard Herrmann Symphony

After suffering the humiliation of having his score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1966 film Torn Curtain tossed aside and replaced, Bernard Herrmann turned right around and set to work on a film score that many feel contains his finest work: Fahrenheit 451, released in 1967 by Universal. The movie, which is director Francois Truffaut's sole English-language film, puts on celluloid Ray Bradbury's classic and terrifying novel of the same name – a tale of a not-so-distant future in which books, any and all books, are deemed to be subversive by a repressive mega-government. Herrmann's score proves once again that some of the finest film scoring efforts achieve their greatness by going firmly against the superficial grain of the film. The Fahrenheit 451 score is intense, human, and deeply personal (and, as such, sometimes quite unhappy or ugly) in a cinematic world that is cold and absolutely inhuman. What Herrmann provides is less a depiction of or even response to the elements of plot and cinematography, but more a ticket into some internal cross-section of the protagonist, Guy Montag, that finds its way to the screen only fleetingly. Beyond that, it is a musical bill of faith in the eternally unbreakable human spirit, an element that comes into the movie only at its very end. The movie often moves along in two very different layers – sight and sound (film proper) and musical score – and the effect can be overwhelming.

When Martin Scorsese decided to remake "Cape Fear", he paid tribute to the original by featuring original stars Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, and Martin Balsam in cameos. Scorsese also recognized the contribution of the first film's composer Bernard Herrmann. Thus, Elmer Bernstein, himself a legendary musician (and recent Oscar nominee for "Far from Heaven"), adapted, arranged, and conducted Herrmann's original score for the newer film. This is a marriage of two giants in the business. A score that is as haunting and chilling as the more recognizable works "Psycho" and "Marnie", "Cape Fear" is true Herrmann with its ominous cues and screeching strings. Fans of Herrmann, Bernstein, or Scorsese must have this one!

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.

In the early years of the twentieth century, composer Cyril Scott was briefly heralded as one of the brightest hopes for English music, but after the First World War, as public tastes shifted, his work fell out of favor with audiences, and it was only toward the end of the twentieth century that a critical reappraisal began. His music, which was admired by Debussy, Elgar, and Strauss, is being played with greater frequency and is finding new listeners. The pieces presented here, his two piano concertos and Early One Morning, a tone poem for piano and orchestra, were recorded in 1975 and 1977 by pianist John Ogdon with Bernard Herrmann conducting the London Philharmonic.

Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (1992)
DVDRip | 710x482 | .MKV/AVC @ 2000 Kbps | 57mn 58s | 894 MiB
Audio: English AAC 128 kbps, 2 channels | Subs: None
Genre: Documentary | Biography

Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann is a 1992 documentary film directed by Joshua Waletzky. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.