Herrmann: A Concert of English Music (1945) – Pearl CD Reissue

The death of Bernard Herrmann on Christmas Eve, 1975, in Hollywood, deprived the film and music worlds of one of their most outspoken, colourful and talented personalities. It is true that his choleric personality and abrasiveness were not exactly endearing but in the words of one who was close to him, he was like ‘ a toffee-apple, all crusty on the outside and soft on the inside’.
“ Benny,” to his friends, was born in New York City in 1911 and showed an interest in music at an early age. After graduating he went to New York University and later became a student at the Juilliard School of Music. His career took a professional turn when he went to work for the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1933. He soon made his mark on their radio programmes, planning them in an unconventional way and featuring rarely heard music seldom played in public concert halls. One American composer whom Herrmann championed for many years was Charles Ives, several of whose works received their premieres under his direction.

Always an ardent anglophile, Herrmann presented a great deal of English music on the CBS network, introducing compositions by Vaughan Williams, Bax, Delius, Cyril Scott and many others. Indeed, when Herrmann became Conductor-in-Chief of the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in 1940, Baker’s Musical Dictionary noted that he was ‘probably responsible for introducing more new works to American radio audiences than any other conductor.’
By 1948 he had also earned a chapter in David Ewen’s Dictators of the Baton in which the author commented on Herrmann’s ‘lack of attention to detail’ but concluded: ‘ Whatever his faults as a conductor may be, it cannot be denied that he is a splendid musician, that he has an enthusiasm which is found contagiously in his performances, and that with his detestation of the stereotyped he has been one of the most invigorating influences in the radio music of the past two decades.’
Although he was busy championing the music of others, he did not neglect his own composing career and by the late 1940s several of his concert works had received notable performances. Barbirolli had conducted his Cantata Moby Dick with the New York Philharmonic in 1940 and his Symphony was performed by the same orchestra under Howard Barlow in 1942.That same year Beecham conducted the CBS Symphony in the suite Welles Raises Kane . The Devil and Daniel Webster Suite was given its concert premiere by Ormandy and his Philadelphians in 1944 and was taken up by Stokowski and the New York Philharmonic in 1949.
After the war, Herrmann made many guest appearances in British concert halls and in 1950 completed work on his most ambitious composition, the windswept lyric-drama Wuthering Heights . This was a project which had occupied him for three years and reflected his wide literary tastes.
In 1951 after the CBS Symphony Orchestra was disbanded, he spent more time in England, where he eventually settled. In 1956 he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in two broadcasts, one of which included the British premiere of Charles Ives’s Second Symphony ( PASC 232 ) and Elgar’s Falstaff , a particular Herrmann favourite. He considered it to be Elgar’s ‘supreme orchestral work’ and it was one that he also performed in his CBS days ( PASC 202 ).
As time went on his public appearances became less frequent, the last of them taking place at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1974, when he conducted the Royal Philharmonic in a Byron Commemoration Concert featuring music by Berlioz, Liszt, Richard Arnell and Elizabeth Maconchy.

Bernard Herrmann’s own concert works haven’t really established themselves in the regular repertoire but his name is still kept firmly in the public eye by the many films for which he wrote the music. Quite a few of these appear on TV from time to time and there is no doubt that it was in this sphere of composition he was at his best. He was introduced to the world of motion picture music by Orson Welles, for whose Mercury Theatre Playhouse Herrmann had written background scores in his early CBS radio days. When Welles moved from broadcasting to the cinema he took his Mercury Theatre colleagues with him and made Citizen Kane . This was Herrmann’s first film music assignment and it set him on a second career which he pursued to the end of his life.
One of the most notable director/composer collaborations in cinema history began in 1955 when Bernard Herrmann wrote the score for The Trouble with Harry , the first of several Alfred Hitchcock films on which he was to work. His second Hitchcock film was a splendid remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and included Herrmann’s only screen appearance. This occurs in the famous Albert Hall sequence marking the film’s climax and featured the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Arthur Benjamin’s Storm Clouds Cantata , the same music that had been heard in Hitchcock’s earlier version of the story in 1934.