Red explores works by Bernard Herrmann

They are among the most familiar, and terrifying, sounds ever to hit the silver screen:

The high-pitched, overlapping violins that accompany Janet Leigh's chilling shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" were the inspiration of Bernard Herrmann, the director's composer of choice and one of moviedom's most imaginative creative artists.

But Herrmann was much more than a Hollywood figure who evoked sonic fear. Aside from his Hitchcock projects, the New York-born composer wrote the scores for numerous other beloved films, including "Citizen Kane," "Jane Eyre," "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir," "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (in which he appears as the conductor) and "Taxi Driver."

And Herrmann composed an opera, "Wuthering Heights," that Jonathan Sheffer, artistic director and conductor of Red (an orchestra), deems a masterpiece.

Many sides of this complex and fascinating composer will be explored when Sheffer and his ensemble devote their final concert of the season Saturday at Masonic Auditorium to Herrmann's versatile art.

A suite from "Psycho" - with those shrieking violins - will share the stage with "La Belle Dame sans Merci," which Herrmann wrote for CBS Radio in 1934 and Arnold Schoenberg's "Accompaniment to a Film Scene." Although Schoenberg's piece never accompanied a film, his style influenced Herrmann. The program will include clips from Herrmann movies.

Sheffer is most excited to lead excerpts from "Wuthering Heights," which has received few productions and only one recording (conducted on the Unicorn label in the 1960s by the composer). Soprano Renee Fleming can be heard singing Cathy's Act II aria, "I have dreamt," with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under James Levine on a Decca compact disc.

As a composer himself who has scored and conducted films, Sheffer long has been intrigued with Herrmann, a tortured soul often in conflict with others as well as his own demons.

"I think that's what attracted him to 'Wuthering Heights,' what attracted him to Cathy and Heathcliff," said Sheffer. "Cathy is a divided soul. She loves Heathcliff but marries Edgar Linton. She couldn't love Heathcliff, because civilized society wouldn't allow it."

Part of Herrmann's inner battle stemmed from his desire to be considered seriously beyond the realm of celluloid. The composer- conductor came to resent his success in the movie business.

"He nurtured the feeling of having been a sellout, like Cathy in 'Wuthering Heights,' " said Sheffer. "Herrmann was an irascible person, hard to like. His first in-laws didn't want their daughter to marry him."

Nevertheless, she did, and more. Lucille Fletcher wrote the libretto for her husband's operatic adaptation of "Wuthering Heights," though the marriage later collapsed.

Sheffer feels a kinship with Herrmann for a reason aside from their mutual connection to film music (or the fact that they both attended Juilliard). Herrmann started a chamber orchestra in New York in the 1930s, just as Sheffer did in the 1990s - Eos Orchestra, which presented adventurous programs similar to those the conductor has devised for Red for nine years.

With Eos in 2000, Sheffer performed excerpts from "Wuthering Heights," an experience that convinced him that the work, despite problems, is as good as or better than most American operas.

"I feel it's an opera that stands on the same level as [the Gershwins'] 'Porgy and Bess' and [Barber's] 'Vanessa,' " he said. "I've never advocated for a piece as much as this opera, because I have real passion for American opera, and American opera is such a strange wasteland in many ways."

Sheffer isn't theorizing. With former Lyric Opera of Chicago artistic director Matthew Epstein, he compiled a list of 25 prominent American operas.

At Saturday's concert, he'll conduct five excerpts that trace the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff, who were played in the 1939 film version by Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. The score includes an interlude that film buffs will recognize as the ardent main theme from "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."

The opera "shows the passionate side of Herrmann," said Sheffer. "It has a through-composed quality that puts me in mind of Puccini and Tchaikovsky."

Herrmann was incapable of revising the opera, which Sheffer believes would thrive with judicious cuts. After his Eos performance in 2000, he learned that the Herrmann family might be willing for the piece to be staged in a new version. The real challenge, said Sheffer, is getting an opera company interested.

Meanwhile, there's Saturday's performance to whet the appetite for "Wuthering Heights" and to remind an audience of Herrmann's heightened ability to add striking emotion and atmosphere to visual images.

The program "gives you a sense of the man," Sheffer said, "and how the movies affect us all."

Here’s some interesting information regarding Herrmann’s late work with Brian DePalma, and his influence on his “successor” Pino Donaggio:

Pino Donaggio’s association with Brian De Palma on a number of the director’s deliberately Hitchcockian thrillers has led to the composer’s being compared to Bernard Herrmann, and inevitably coming up the loser.

Herrmann provided De Palma with the intense scores for two of the director’s earliest Hitchcock pastiches, Sisters and Obsession. Carrie, Donaggio’s first score for De Palma, was to have been a Herrmann assignment too, but the composer died suddenly. Donaggio has been replacing Herrmann for De Palma ever since.

Early on, Donaggio had established a distinct and recognizable musical voice all his own, characterized by lyrical melodies—usually for woodwinds backed by guitar or piano—juxtaposed against suspense cues provided by jarring chords and sharply sustained string lines.

In general Donaggio’s scores, often conducted by Natale Massara, show an ability to adapt to a variety of classical and contemporary stylings. Donaggio likes to experiment with a broad range of musical styles, such as the Giorgio Moroder-style effects in Body Double or the pop presentation of a Rossini-style overture for the comedy Home Movies.

His stylistic signature of using the same instrumentation for both love themes and suspenseful passages evidenced itself in his first major score, for Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. The score’s lyrical themes give way to trills in the upper registers of the woodwinds, high-pitched strings, and jarring chords on piano, guitar, and harp. Don’t Look Now shows evidence of Donaggio’s classical training as well as his background in jazz and pop, and also shows his ability to deliberately compose against the tone of the film by providing richly melodic themes identified with the characters rather than the terrifying events that are occurring.

By employing Herrmannesque orchestrations and compositional elements in his subsequent work for De Palma, Donaggio has significantly muted this early voice, becoming a sort of ersatz-Herrmann instead—and, therefore, complicit in the negative comparison that haunts him.

His recent, often very different work, in genres other than the De Palma thriller may, in time, bring an end to the invited Herrmann comparisons and lead to his being recognized for his own individual, often lyrical, style. Donaggio has been associated with Joe Dante (Piranha, The Howling) and more recently with Liliana Cavani (Behind the Door, The Berlin Affair). Donaggio has provided scores for Westerns (Amore, piombo, e furore), political thrillers (Corruzione al palazzo di giustizia), contemporary dramas (Tex), and light romantic films (Over the Brooklyn Bridge).

Despite the diversity of subject matter and use of various musical styles, these scores are more characteristic of the real—i.e., non-Herrmann—Donaggio, than his work for De Palma.

—Richard R. Ness, updated by John McCarty

http://www.filmreference.com/Writers-and-Production-Artists-De-Edo/Donaggio-Pino.html

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