‘Classic Thriller Soundtracks’ @ the BBC Proms

Bernard Herrmann
North by Northwest – Prelude
Psycho – A Short Suite for String Orchestra

David Raksin arr Juliette Pochin
Laura (song)

Bernard Herrmann
Vertigo – Suite

Korngold
Cello Concerto in C major, Op. 37

Quincy Jones arr Callum Au
Ironside – Theme 

Quincy Jones arr Guy Barker
In the Heat of the Night 

Bernard Herrmann arr Callum Au
Twisted Nerve – Theme 

Bernard Herrmann arr Christopher Palmer
Taxi Driver – A Night Piece 

Isaac Hayes arr Fiona Brice
Shaft – Theme 

Quincy Jones
The Italian Job – On Days Like These

Lalo Schifrin arr Juliette Pochin
Bullitt – Shifting Gears 

Quincy Jones arr Callum Au
The Italian Job – It’s Caper Time

Edith Bowman (presenter)
Lance Ellington (vocals)
Ashton Jones (vocals)
Jonas Pap (whistler)
Sumudu Jayatilaka (backing vocals)
Louise Marshall (backing vocals)
Melanie Marshall (backing vocals)
Andrew Playfoot (backing vocals)

Sterling Elliott (cello)

BBC Concert Orchestra
Edwin Outwater

At some point Proms planners will have noted that 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Bernard Herrmann but what to do about it? Like most of the great film music composers, Herrmann would sooner have been recognised for his under-appreciated accomplishments in other genres. The verdict of John Amis – ‘I don’t think it’s great music, but it’s entertaining’ – is typical but makes little sense. Genius or not, Bernard Herrmann never set out to please. An accidental movie man, he lacked not only the affability of younger colleagues (tellingly his colleague André Previn was derided as ‘that jazz boy’) but also the stylistic dexterity and pragmatism expected of so-called ‘background’ music. Like Copland and Vaughan Williams when writing for the cinema, Herrmann had no truck with Broadway tropes, Viennese nostalgia or (later) the kind of ‘commercial’ pop scores featured in the second half of tonight’s concert. He detested compromise, fashioning scores from dour, nagging, gnomic ideas, obsessive ostinati and low-register glowering, his progressions often rising and falling without resolution to create a very particular brand of suspense. His magnum opus, the opera Wuthering Heights (completed in 1951 after eight years of work), has never been sampled at a Prom and neither has anything else he wrote for the concert hall. I’m guessing that at some point the powers that be chickened out of scheduling a full-blown Herrmann anniversary tribute, subsuming the remnants into this ‘popular’ BBC Concert Orchestra date. Whatever the explanation the BBC’s programme booklet betrayed a lack of familiarity with the oeuvre, even at one point praising Herrmann for injecting the spirit of 1960s London into The Italian Job. On subsequent pages the score of that Michael Caine movie was correctly ascribed to the late Quincy Jones whose versatility could not have been further from Herrmann’s own unyielding aesthetic. 

From Herrmann’s film work there was only one less than familiar piece, his title music for Roy Boulting’s 1968 British thriller, Twisted Nerve, featuring the virtuoso whistling of Jonas Pap. Before the interval Herrmann classics were contextualized by older Hollywood hands. David Raksin’s masterly theme from Laura, subjected to multiple transformations in the course of Otto Preminger film of 1944, was heard only in generic, miked up, nostalgic MOR song form, giving little idea of its sultry power. Herrmann’s music for Vertigo was treated more generously. We heard the composer’s own three-movement suite though all three were short and perhaps only the last of them, the film’s Wagnerian love scene, really worked in a concert context. What the bright, clean performance lacked was the kind of passion, grit and sheer heft we know Herrmann required of his collaborators. The Cello Concerto Korngold derived from Deception (1946), a Bette Davis melodrama, is one of his lesser concert pieces for all that it was good to hear Sterling Elliott play it with confidence and sensitivity. Sadly, the Lilliputian sonority of cello and orchestra was something of a problem from my seat: Korngold’s one decent lyrical theme just about hit home. In the movie, ‘cellist’ Paul Henreid mimes to a pre-recorded playback by Eleanor Aller (not only a member of the Hollywood String Quartet as announced by Bowman but mother of erstwhile BBC Symphony Orchestra chief, Leonard Slatkin).

Part 2 proved a startlingly chaotic lucky dip with acknowledgement of the recent passing of Lalo Schifrin shoehorned into a more substantial tribute to the late Quincy Jones alongside some more Herrmann.  Dapper in his bright red suit, Ashton Jones did his best Ray Charles impression to uplifting effect in a fine Guy Barker arrangement of Quincy Jones’s powerful title song from In the Heat of the Night (1967). More incongruous was Isaac Hayes’s title music from Shaft, ‘blaxploitation’ but a breakthrough production in terms of expanding black representation in commercial cinema in 1971. Herrmann would have been utterly perplexed by the juxtaposition of chart-friendly funk with his own final score, for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). The Anglophile elitist accommodates jazz influences of a kind; Nick Moss was the eloquent soloist in the film’s keynote sax solo.

In his surprise on-screen appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Technicolor remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Herrmann can be seen conducting in the Royal Albert Hall. The music is not his own but rather his rejigged version of the Storm Cloud Cantata by Arthur Benjamin composed for Hitchcock’s 1934 original. It is this arrangement rather than a Herrmann original that will feature in the Last Night next week. The present concert billed as ‘Classic Thriller Soundtracks’ was brightly directed by Edwin Outwater, the batonless American principal guest conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra. It was also said to be ‘curated’ by him although the band has been playing mixed programmes of this kind for more than a generation. The glamour, enthusiasm, scholarship and sheer class of John Wilson and his Orchestra may be just a fond memory, but at least the BBC was giving cinema music a go again at the Proms. There was an encore, the shark theme from Jaws in which John Williams’s subterranean rumbling felt initially redolent of Herrmann even if his main idea is lifted bodily from Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. There was much to enjoy here but it is always unwise to switch between the electronically assisted and the unmiked and expect the latter to ‘compete’. The aesthetic incongruities were not much helped by occasional linking fluff from presenter Edith Bowman: three outfits, nothing to say.