Music
Hitchcock's Blackmail
City Halls, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
five stars
The weather had not deterred the people Glasgow from venturing out to the Merchant City Festival, and for hundreds of them the City Halls were the ultimate destination, after an afternoon of outdoor blues (music), a diverse array of street traders, and packed pubs of folk escaping the showers.
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra provided the festival with a flagship event, in a brace of concerts conducted by screen music specialist Timothy Brock. The second accompanied a screening of the last silent movie by Alfred Hitchcock, with a score written by Neil Brand, whose pianistic accompaniment to early cinema has been a crucial attraction of the silent film festivals at Bo'ness Hippodrome. His orchestral writing derives much from that experience, with witty references in the music to the onscreen action, all beautifully played by musicians clearly having a ball with the drama of it all. The chance to see a 1929 classic in a crisp print on a big screen, and spot Hitchcock tropes recycled in later movies, was as much a bonus as the main feature.
The full supporting bill had come three hours earlier, with the recording of a live edition of Matthew's Sweet's excellent Radio 3 show, The Sound of Cinema. As well-scripted as it always is, the show had Brock and the SSO exploring some of the best known parts of the Hitchcock soundtrack canon, and will be broadcast on August 15. Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette that prefaced "Alfred Hitchcock presents" kicked things off, before the band bowled through Rebecca, Notorious, Vertigo and Psycho, with the strings on top form for Bernard Herrmann, and great individual moments from trumpeter Mark O'Keeffe, Lynda Cochrane on celeste, timpanist Gordon Rigby and special guest Lydia Kavina adding the theremin to Spellbound.
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