Herrmann and Korngold

I used to teach a course in film music a while ago, and one of my great pleasures was teaching Erich Korngold's score for the Errol Flynn adventure story, "The Sea Hawk".  Korngold's score is a musical wonder, a kind of opera without voices that runs almost constantly through the movie.  His music is truly sophisticated, with some very complex motivic development that follows the characters through the film and with fabulously orchestrated harmonies.  Korngold  was instrumental in defining the sound of the Hollywood score in the 1930's and 1940's.   (Which then fell out of fashion in the 1960's and 1970's, until George Lucas and John Williams revived Korngold's music for Star Wars.)  
My other great pleasure in teaching the film music course was in getting to know the music of Bernard Herrmann, who has frequently been called the greatest film music composer ever.   His work with Alfred Hitchcock was one of the great filmmaker/composer collaborations of all time, and their "Vertigo" is one of the 20th centuries great music dramas.

So when I saw that Leon Botstein's "The Orchestra Now" was performing music of Herrmann and Korngold in Carnegie Hall, I bought a ticket.   They were performing Herrmann's "Psycho Suite" and his symphony, and Korngold's symphony as well.
The music of "Psycho" is famous,  of course, for the shower scene music.   The suite is an arrangement of cues from the film; it is a series of 2-3-minute movements.  The music is wonderful and expressive, but, because of the nature of the sequence of short cues, it doesn't really develop or work very well as concert music.  I wanted to somehow refashion it into a continuous stretch of music.  And, interestingly, the shower scene music, with its closely-miked harsh glissandi, sounded much blander in person.   The symphony was written early in Hermann's career (around 1940), and is in the conventional four movements.  The music has the general character of American symphonic music of the time; some of it seems fairly generic, while other moments are very striking.  Not a masterpiece, but I've heard a lot worse, and was very happy to hear it.   As it was early in Herrmann's career, I didn't really hear any echoes of the very individual style of his later film music.
Korngold wrote his symphony after he had more or less finished with Hollywood, in 1954. Unfortunately, the reception of Korngold's concert music was tarnished by both the fact that he had spent considerable time writing for Hollywood and that his music was rooted in the sound of the early 20th century.  He was harshly criticized for both "selling out", and for writing music that was "old-fashioned", a cardinal sin at the time.   (I can't help but think that he would be treated much differently nowadays.)   I greatly enjoyed the piece, though; Korngold was truly talented composer who happened to be born at the wrong time.  (Readers of this blog will know of my normal distaste for anything neoromantic.)   In this case, though, the romanticism is the real thing.   I think my pleasure in the music also has something to do with my love of the films that featured his music.   (I am looking forward to watching the new Blu-ray of "The Sea Wolf", which has one of Korngold's most adventurous scores.)
"The Orchestra Now" is basically a master's degree orchestra at Bard college, and is made up of young musicians who have finished their undergraduate degrees.   Their performances were excellent, I thought.   Much like the Juilliard Orchestra, this orchestra makes up for its relative lack of experience with both energy and commitment, and most importantly, extended rehearsal time which (I assume) exceeds that of a conventional pick-up orchestra.   I can certainly imagine a better performance, but in a era when most professional orchestras play it as safe as possible, playing the same pieces over and over again), it is so exciting to have someone not play the same pieces that are always played.  Thank you Leon Botstein!