Naxos American Classics Presents Herrmann

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this month, the Naxos American Classics series released its latest recording. Each of these albums tends to focus on a single composer, and the composer presented on this new CD is Bernard Herrmann. He is probably best known as one of the leading composers of film music during the twentieth century, with particular attention to the movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock. On this new release, that side of his career is represented by “Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra,” a quarter-hour concert work that developed key themes from the music he composed for Hitchcock’s Psycho. Herrmann composed this “narrative” in 1968, about eight years after the release of the film; and the score was reconstructed by John Mauceri in 1999.

This selection is preceded by “Souvenirs de voyage,” a three-movement quintet for clarinet and string quartet composed in 1967. This is performed by clarinetist David Jones along with violinists Netanel Draiblate and Eva Cappelletti Chao, violist Philippe Chao, and cellist Benjamin Capps. This chamber music offering provides a useful context for identifying many of the themes and harmonic progressions that served Herrmann well in his work for the film industry.

However, most of the album is dominated by another genre that Herrmann served: radio drama. The first half hour of the recording is devoted to the radio play Whitman, whose content is based heavily on Leaves of Grass, the collection of Walt Whitman’s poetry. The script was developed in 1944 by Norman Corwin, who set an impressively high bar for the standards of radio drama.

In many respects, however, Herrmann’s music for this play was even more “incidental” than much of the music he provided for the movies. As a result, this selection does not provide much of an account of Herrmann’s skills in serving the needs of others. On the other hand those that enjoy Whitman’s poetry will probably appreciate the qualities that baritone William Sharp brings to reciting those texts.

Consequently Herrmann does not get a particularly fair shake from the production of his music by Naxos American Classics. Readers may recall that, in May of 2018, Sony Classical released a 61-CD box set of all of its recordings made by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. One of those CDs was a far more satisfying album of Herrmann’s film scores, including the eleven-movement suite for strings based on the music composed for Psycho.

Much as I enjoy this album, however, my personal favorite is Citizen Kane: The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann, now available as a Sony reissue. Those familiar with the Citizen Kane film by Orson Welles know that it includes a made-up opera, Salammbo, and a scene with a soprano aria. This amounts to a clever musical “in-joke;” but, on this particular album, the soprano is Kiri Te Kanawa, who had no trouble getting into the spirit of things. Of much greater interest, however, is the film Hangover Square, which is basically about a concert pianist driven to acts of homicide by exposure to too much dissonance. The film’s climax comes when the protagonist must play the premiere performance of a new piano concerto that (as might be guessed) excels in its dissonances. That concerto is included in its entirety (featuring pianist Joaquín Achúcarro as the concerto soloist).

Thus, while the new Naxos album is an impressive undertaking, I am afraid that there are several better ways to appreciate Herrmann’s talents as a composer.