Hitchcock Concert on Wednesday

...and a cool thing nobody knew about Psycho

by Lukas Kendall

We've announced this before, but there's a concert on Wednesday the 27th here in Los Angeles that people should know about:

October 27, Hollywood Bowl S.O., Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, Alfred Hitchcock Centennial Concert, John Mauceri cond.; Storm Clouds Cantata (Benjamin), Spellbound (Rozsa), Psycho, Vertigo (Herrmann), Dial M For Murder, Strangers on a Train (Tiomkin), Rebecca (Newman), Rear Window (Waxman), The Man Who Knew Too Much (Herrmann). There will be a pre-concert lecture by Steven Smith, author of the Herrmann bio Heart at Fire's Center.

Here's the cool new development. According to John Waxman, who rents sheet music for concert performance around the world, it turns out that the Psycho suite that has been performed in concert innumerable times for the last 25 years was NOT the suite that Herrmann himself put together. This came up when conductor Mauceri was speaking to Waxman about the scores for the above concert -- Mauceri noted that the scores and parts for Psycho that Waxman had given him did match Herrmann's recording of the Psycho suite from his 1968 album, Music from the Great Movie Thrillers, on the London label. Unfortunately, only Herrmann and Christopher Palmer, both deceased, would have known the differences off hand.

So, the end of the story is that Herrmann's 1968 suite -- which does not significantly alter the cues from Psycho but does cut and configure them in a more flowing, coherent way -- will finally be premiered in concert this Wednesday. Future concert performances of the 14-minute Psycho suite will finally reflect Herrmann's intentions (for concert performance, not the movie of course) from now on.

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