Herrmann: Hangover Square & Citizan Kane

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Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra continue their survey of seemingly every piece of film music worthy of a full recording. In this instance, they've taken on two Bernard Herrmann scores from the 1940s -- Herrmann's Oscar-nominated music from Citizen Kane (which was beaten out for a statuette that year by Herrmann's own score for The Devil and Daniel Webster), and his music for Hangover Square. Both scores have been well-represented by good re-recordings in the past, most notably by Charles Gerhardt for RCA-Victor in the early '70s, but amazingly, this does mark the first full treatment for either. The dark, often snarling score for Hangover Square was a rich source of subsequent thematic material for Herrmann that he mined on and off for nearly three decades, right up to his penultimate film project, Obsession. Here we get the original versions of those and other cues that later became far more famous in other soundtracks, as well as the full Concerto Macabre, the centerpiece of the entire score. It is the main attraction of this CD, owing both to its own virtues and the role that some of this material played in Herrmann's later career. The music from Citizen Kane is more specifically tied to the film for which it was composed -- Herrmann had a chance to indulge in his taste for period music style, as well as to parody other composers' styles (especially Richard Strauss), and he ran with it, all locked to the images of the movie (from which it is impossible to escape while listening to this CD). The one and only major weak point is soprano Orla Boylan's singing on the aria from Salaambo -- she's technically fine, giving the kind of performance that Charles Foster Kane obviously wanted to hear from Susan Alexander Kane; but she is not anywhere near Kiri Te Kanawa, who recorded the aria for Gerhardt, in either her acting intensity or her embrace of the fragmentary role. The sound is first-rate, and the performances are, apart from Boylan's slight deficiency, first-rate, though one wishes that the BBC Philharmonic had put slightly more into the nuances of playing -- Gerhardt's orchestra clearly had more fun with this music, even if they didn't get to play as much of it.

© Bruce Eder /TiVo