Customer Reviews

The Film Music of Bernard Herrmann - Hangover Square & Citizen Kane

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I don't think you can get a better performance, nor recording, than this. Its fast, and well followed by the orchestra (they keep up). Listen to some of the other recordings of this and you'll know what I mean. I bought this for the Hangover Square, thought it would have a decent performance, I was not prepared to be blown away. Not Many people get Herrmann; hes usually played too slow, but not Rumon Gamba, he gets it.

I grew up with Charles Gerhardt's RCA recordings of film music and his recording of Bernard Herrmann's music for Citizen Kane was one of my favorites from this sadly out-of-print series. Thankfully, this new recording featuring an extended selection of music from Citizen Kane (almost 50 minutes worth of music) and excerpts from Hangover Square (including the Concerto macabre) is excellent.

The Hangover Square music is well-suited to the film's tale of madness and murder. Menacing piano chords, snarling brass, swirling strings and rattling percussion dominate. It's not necessarily accessible music, but it certainly does set a mood and you must admire the fiery virtuosity conductor Rumon Gamba draws from the BBC Philharmonic players.

The most famous music from Hangover Square is the Concerto Macabre. If you have seen the film you will certainly remember the scene where the deranged composer George Bone hammers away at the piano as a building burns and collapses around him. Herrmann's concerto owes an obvious debt to Liszt's Totentanz and pianist Martin Roscoe plays the hell out of it. This is over-the-top music for an extremely over-the-top film sequence.

The Citizen Kane music is brilliant. Once again Herrmann serves what appears on the screen with a score that is not easy to pigeon-hole, just like the film's title character. Herrmann's music is a riveting mix of antic gallops and dark melancholy. There's even a faux French grand opera aria that is nicely sung by soprano Orla Boylan. The BBC Philharmonic performances are all top-notch and the sound quality of the CD is stunning. It sounds trite, but when I listen to this CD I see the films in my head, I suspect this is high praise for a recording of film music. I hope Gamba and the BBC have more Herrmann in store for us.

After years of only having the magnificent "Concerto Macabre" from the classic HANGOVER SQUARE on both LP and CD, it is a joyous occasion that we now have the extended score on this well produced, beautifully performed CD. (I do think, however, that certain music cues are missing that would have made for an even richer acoustic brew: by this I mean the piercing discordant music that sets Bone off, for one. It is played here - but I don't think it is played from its first "appearance" in the film. By-the-way, that high-pitched discord presaged the "Psycho" murder shriek-theme by many years. Both pieces of music are the best acoustic equivalents of murder ever composed, in my estimation. I also think that some of the Bone and Nette music underscore (based on the music he is writing for her songs) is not given its due herein.) Regardless, the fact that we now have more music from one of Herrmann's best scores is a cause for rejoicing.

As to the "Citizen Kane" section of this CD, it is a pity that the full score is not offered us. Somewhere in my collection I have the complete score (I believe only on vinyl, however) - but it was, again, the complete score. So, absent from this CD is most noticeably the March of Time sequence and the end credit sequence which is the bouncing, joyful, orchestrated version of the "Mr. Kane" song. Admittedly, Herrmann did not write the majority of the music for the "March of Time" sequence and the end credit song - whilst orchestrated by the Maestro - was not an original composition of his own. I believe it was a theme out of Mexico that Welles liked and recommended. The fact that these musical selections are not included is most likely due to the fact that they were not written by Herrmann. Still and all, it would have been nice to have the full score.

One final thought: Martin Roscoe, the pianist with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under Rumon Gamba's baton, performs the "Concerto Macabre" arguably even better than it is done in the film.

Rated: 10/10

Bernard Herrmann is responsible for the soundtracks of some of the greatest films of all time -- among them, Citizen Kane (featured on this disc), Vertigo, Psycho, and Taxi Driver. His ability to create moodscapes ranging from sheer horror to soaring melodic swells is uncanny and effortless.

On this disc, we hear Herrmann toward the beginning of his career in music from Citizen Kane (1940) and from Hangover Square (1944).

I was most anticipating hearing the BBC Philharmonic's recording of Citizen Kane, but it seems the real gem on this disc is the music from Hangover Square -- music that almost nobody has heard until now, because, well, almost nobody has ever seen or heard of the film.

Hangover Square is where the listener really gets a glimpse into the incredible composer that Herrmann would become. While clearly evident in his score for Kane, the impetuous madness in Hangover Square can easily be seen creeping into his scores for Vertigo and Psycho. And if hearing this great music for the first time weren't enough, track 4, the Concerto Macabre from Hangover Square is a triumph. Martin Roscoe handles this 11+ minute piano concerto with bravado, including the over 1.5 minute solo ending.

The music from Kane is quite varied stylistically for Herrmann. He goes from trademark clock-ticking fright to glorious swells in the strings (reminiscent of Vertigo's love themes) and seamlessly creates the fun, excited atmosphere of Russian circus music.

I love this disc and will return to it over and over again.

This CD presents two of Bernard Herrmann's classic film scores from early in his career. They have been arranged from the original manuscripts by Stephen Hogger and played by the BBC Philharmonic led by a conductor who has become a leading light in film score recordings, Rumon Gamba. Everything about this production is first-class. The booklet notes by Günther Kögebehn are exemplary and I have borrowed from them for this review.

'Hangover Square' (1944) came on the heels of a movie that had been a big hit, 'The Lodger', starring Laird Cregar. 'Hangover Square', although taken from an unrelated novel by Patrick Hamilton, was massively rewritten to imitate 'The Lodger' and to accommodate the early 1940s fad (following the unexpected success of the 'Warsaw Concerto' in the film 'Dangerous Moonlight') of featuring a piano concerto, in this case played by the lead character, George Harvey Bone. Bone was a composer/pianist who had a Jekyll/Hyde personality and who, when insane, is an arsonist. The climax of the movie has him playing the première of his concerto after having set fire to the concert hall. The final pages of the concerto are played in the inferno after everyone, including the orchestra, has gotten out safely. As a result this concerto is probably the only one ever written that ends with the piano playing alone! The music for the film is among the eeriest ever written for a movie. It certainly sets forth the weird character of George Harvey Bone.

'Citizen Kane', of course, has in many surveys been called the greatest movie ever made in America. It was the brainchild of the boy wonder, Orson Welles, and the music score was Bernard Herrmann's first for the movies. In New York he had been a part of Welles' team for The Mercury Theater of the Air (the group that broadcast the notorious dramatization of 'The War of the Worlds' that set off a panic because listeners thought it was an actual newscast) and he had come west with Welles when the director was to make his first film. Of course Welles used him to score 'Citizen Kane'. Of many notable things in the score, two stand out: the use of a variant of the 'Dies Irae' in its opening measures, Herrmann's way of foreshadowing the ultimate course of the film, and the music Herrmann wrote for Kane's soprano wife, Susan, in her failed effort to become an opera star. In the latter case Herrmann wrote that he had to write music for a singer who wasn't awful but who clearly didn't have what it took to be a great diva. He did this by using a lyric soprano singing music that was intentionally a bit too high and too heavy for her light voice, a device that works brilliantly.

These performances are spectacularly good. Martin Roscoe, the fine British pianist, is the soloist in the piano concerto from 'Hangover Square' and soprano Orla Boylan sings in the 'Citizen Kane' operatic music.

Strong recommendation.

Scott Morrison