GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – September 2019

Movie music aficionados are a very particular breed – serious, knowledgeable, fanatical. Even the soft-core variety – as I once was – are fiercely defensive of their favourite practitioners. The music and the indelible images they amplify are forever stored in their imagination. For me as a teenage boy, movie soundtracks were both a parallel path and a way into the rarefied world of classical music. At one time I embraced both equally. And I distinctly remember my parents’ disappointment that I would split my hard-earned spending money equally between acquiring the latest Dmitri Tiomkin or Bronislaw Kaper score (namely 55 Days at Peking and Mutiny on the Bounty) and my first recording of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique (Ferenc Fricsay and the Berlin Philharmonic). In my parents’ eyes the money spent on these often short-measure soundtracks was better spent on ‘proper music’. My protests went unheeded.

I acquired some treasures on the movie front: a rare LP pressing of Alfred Newman’s highly intense score for The Diary of Anne Frank and the lavish fold-out booklet edition of Alex North’s sensational score for Kubrick’s Spartacus. The Main Title of that score was especially striking for its brassy dissonance and there were parallels to be drawn with André Previn’s equally uncompromising strings and brass treatment (referencing Hindemith’s Music for Strings and Brass) for Elmer Gantry released in the same year 1960.

But this was also the era of Miklos Rosza whose Oscar winning Ben-Hur score took epic orchestral scoring and fabulous Hebraic themes to another level. I distinctly remember the in-built Overture for its first run at the Empire Leicester Square, the gold curtains magically parting to a soft incantation of the unmistakable chords of its thunderous main theme. More than any other movie music I grew up with this score exemplified the interplay and transformation of key motifs. It was the most composerly and ‘symphonic’ of scores.

As my musicality developed and my musical interests broadened I could be more objective about the role of music in the cinema and I became less of a ‘collector’ and more of an ‘observer’. I could take a step backwards and appreciate the immeasurable contribution of Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock or Nino Rota’s for Fellini; I could thrill to Maurice Jarre’s amazing work with synthesized keyboards for the ‘raising of the barn’ sequence in Peter Weir’s masterful Witness and more recently wonder at Hans Zimmer’s work on Gladiator, Interstellar, and Dunkirk.

But as I write I am reminded of a memorable encounter with the godfather of this genre – the most prolific of them all, John Williams – who when I met him for a major feature in The Independent so modestly payed tribute to all the classical composers who had inspired him to boldly go where few had been before. Adorning this month’s front cover ‘Across the Stars’ reimagines key scores through the virtuosic voicings of Anne-Sophie Mutter’s violin – though I’m a little surprised that his undoubted masterpiece ET is not among them. Bicycle or no bicycle Mutter’s Strad was surely born to take that flight.

But Williams made me chuckle when he recalled working with Hitchcock on his last film Family Plot. Hitchcock thought the first draft of the score too lugubrious. ‘But it’s a film about murder’, said Williams. ‘Ah, but murder can be FUN’, retorted Hitchcock.