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![]() ![]() You don’t really know this film, do you, perturbo? To say that “most of the movie has no music, so the audience would be sitting there watching a silent film” – especially about VERTIGO – is ridiculous. If orchestras are unwilling to spend the money required to get a good sound mix in live performance of film scores with film projections, they might program this sound choice. Yet often when it is, it is highly successful. Helping an audience focus on great sung music by stripping away the staging is a path not so often taken. The Boston Symphony put on a thrilling concert version of Elektra and the New York Philharmonic has created Bluebeard with Nina Stemme. Foregoing the visual and focusing on the drama in the singing voice, the Berlin Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve performance of the first act of Die Walkyrie was brilliant (and erotic). Successful motion pictures (Vertigo originally failed at the box office) seem like a safe choice.Īnother response to attracting an audience is the concert or semi-stage performance of opera in the concert hall. In the US, classical music producers look to various visual forms to attract a waning audience. Yet the commitment of time and work this requires are not being undertaken by anxious Symphony organizations. Sound engineers say this would be possible with a dialogue track, a sound effects track and a live orchestra. In filmmaking post production, all the elements are mixed. Whatever the origins of the sounds we heard, they did not mix well or, in fact, at all. Yet dialogue, particularly when there was no music, blasted out. The Philharmonic Orchestra captured the many dimensions of the score–bringing out the thread offered at the opening: the Vertigo chord and the love motif. This is not the hall’s fault, but rather issues that arise as various sound elements combine. The mix of sounds provided in the film’s track did not work in the new Wu Tsai Theater at Lincoln Center. ![]() Concert films with scores performed live are delivered in two parts. The original package is designed for delivery as one experience. The separated music and film may be the culprit. While Hitchcock’s instructions to Herrmann called for obsession and longing, neither the film nor the music reach heights possible when these themes are fully expressed. The music, scored conventionally for strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion, is not rescued by an organ and vibraphone. The story, which fascinated Kim Novak because it was a new take on Hollywood’s predilection for renaming and redesigning its female actors, now seems restrained. While Herrmann has said that music can uniquely express what people are thinking and feeling, his score feels like Mickey Mousing – if there’s obsession on the screen, you’re going to get it in the music. Herrmann brings it into the big time, but not with Wagnerian erotic passion-orgasmic chromaticism and painfully withheld resolutions creating the blend of love merged with death. Vertigo is full of delicious suspended sighs.Yet in Vertigo, a Kiss is no longer just as Kiss. The swirling ascent to putative passion in the first Kiss of James Stewart and Kim Novak recalls Dooley Wilson at the piano in Casablanca. Herrmann picks this image up, building the Vertigo chord, a major triad packed on top of a minor triad. The film opens with brilliant camera shots depicting the fear of falling mixed with a wish to fall: a forward zoom shot combines with a reverse tracking shot. A complex story combines a doppleganger with a long dead Spanish great grandmother (yes, we hear a habanera), and acrophobia. In fact, as the story gets kinkier and kinkier, we realize it isn’t going to be kinky enough for the 21st century. This does not add up to a sweeping drama. Can two men who are deeply odd at first get along in their strangeness and then fall apart because of it?īoth director and composer invested incredible detail in the Vertigo story. These were matched by Herrmann’s own oddity and worked in the end against the alliance. Hitchcock’s head-driven filmmaking led to increasingly kinky takes on human relationships. His relationship with Hitchcock was shattered at the end, but Martin Scorsese would give him work (Taxi Driver) until his dying day. ![]() The film ran on a huge screen above the orchestra.īernard Herrmann competes with John Williams and Ennio Morricone for top position on the all-time great movie composers’ list. Norman Huynh of the Bozeman Symphony conducted. The New York Philharmonic performed Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo. It turned out quite scary, and not in a good way. Our critic Susan Hall went to see and hear the NY Phil take on a Bernard Herrmann Hitchcock score. ![]()
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