Silva Screen Records present earlier composers who were masters of music on Hitchcock films, and later films with Bernard Herrmann on the second CD. The "CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA" is Miklos Rozsa's haunting theme which lasts over nine minutes is something from heaven. "STRANGERS ON THE TRAIN" the Dimitri Tiomkin contribution is also an outstanding track which can move the unmoveable with the heart-racing pounding sounds that the two composers generate. Both composers Rozsa and Tiomkin have a list of accomplishments a mile long, but to hear their music on a Hitchcock film is pure geneious in film making and scoring.

Varese's original soundtrack to Psycho finds Joel McNeely conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra through Bernard Herrmann's classic original score. This album is the first time the entire score has been recorded for an album and its remarkable how eerie and evocative the music is, even when its separated from the film. Psycho stands as one of Herrmann's finest moments, and even if many collectors and film buffs would prefer the original soundtrack recording, this version is essential for fans of the composer, since it is the clearest, cleanest edition of score yet produced.

Vertigo represents the summit of the seven-picture, nine-year association between Alfred Hitchcock and legendary composer Bernard Herrmann. Using instrumental and harmonic colour as the main paints in his repertoire, Herrmann deploys brief melodic cells and minimalist techniques to explore the obsessed world of Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart), a retired detective who has fallen in love with a woman from the past. In doing so, Herrmann broke from the post-romantic aesthetic personified by Golden Age masters such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Alfred Newman. Highlights include the hypnotic, dream-like "Prelude", the churning allegro con brio of "Rooftop", the haunting love music in "Madeleine's First Appearance", a memorable habanera ("Carlotta's Portrait"), and the cathartic "Scene d'Amour", which has been compared with Wagner's "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde. Page Cook, long-time critic for Films In Review, once wrote that Muir Mathieson's performance "remains one of the greatest pieces of film music conducting ever recorded . . . every tempo, every rhythmic nuance, every dynamic inhabits the film." In other words, this is a classic film/music amalgamation that should be in every cinema lover's collection.

They say that good things come in small packages, and this CD would seem to be the musical proof of that statement – certainly there are few more unassuming releases in Bernard Herrmann's output. Joy in the Morning is one of the more obscure movies ever scored by Herrmann and, as is pointed out in the notes by Christopher Husted, it was also the composer's last successfully completed major studio project, coming just ahead of the calamity that attended his work for Alfred Hitchcock on Torn Curtain. It has fallen between the cracks across the years, principally because the movie itself was a good deal less stellar than most of the Hitchcock projects (or, for that matter, the Ray Harryhausen projects) with which Herrmann distinguished himself in the early/mid-'60s. This CD is astonishingly good, however, being not only a close cousin to Herrmann's music for Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) but also containing thematic material in common with his clarinet quintet Souvenirs du Voyage, and string writing that also recalls his work for Vertigo and even Psycho, as well as writing for the reeds and winds that have echoes as far back as Beneath the 12-Mile Reef and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Bernard Herrmann is one of the best composers in the last century. He was capable of conveying emotions with incredible music. His scores always evoked responses from audiences that helped movie directors make their point…

This delightful release, from the Indian Summer of Bernard Herrmann's recording career, always got neglected by its potential audiences, ignored by Herrmann's fans in favor of his recordings of his film music or his own classical compositions (or more conventionally familiar works such as The Planets) and missed totally by jazz listeners of a historical bent. The material contained herein is distinctly symphonic or – perhaps more accurately – concert hall jazz, the work of established composers coming to grips with and using the then-new music in their own idiom…

When Martin Scorsese decided to remake "Cape Fear", he paid tribute to the original by featuring original stars Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, and Martin Balsam in cameos. Scorsese also recognized the contribution of the first film's composer Bernard Herrmann. Thus, Elmer Bernstein, himself a legendary musician (and recent Oscar nominee for "Far from Heaven"), adapted, arranged, and conducted Herrmann's original score for the newer film. This is a marriage of two giants in the business. A score that is as haunting and chilling as the more recognizable works "Psycho" and "Marnie", "Cape Fear" is true Herrmann with its ominous cues and screeching strings. Fans of Herrmann, Bernstein, or Scorsese must have this one!

The least popular of Alfred Hitchcock's late-'50s thrillers – perhaps because it is really a comedy – The Trouble with Harry also has the least well-known of the scores that Bernard Herrmann wrote for Hitchcock's movies. All of that is a shame, because – in keeping with the comedic nature of the movie – Herrmann assumed a lighthearted and upbeat, ironic mask that led to some of the most gorgeous and hauntingly beautiful music of his career; the composer himself clearly felt a fondness for it, as he revived it in 1968 as the basis for his "A Portrait of Hitch." The reed and horn passages are playful and ironic, and the signature string part, bridging the small-town innocence of the movie's setting, is one of the finest things that Herrmann conceived. It all makes for delightful listening, and is some of the best programmatic music to come out of Hollywood in the 1950s. The performance by Joel McNeely and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra is of excellent quality, capturing the finest nuances of the score, and the recording does it full justice.

In collaboration with Litto Enterprises Inc., Music Box Records is very proud to present one of its most ambitious releases yet - a classic Bernard Herrmann score from one of his last efforts and an important milestone in his immense career for Brian De Palma´s classic melodrama Obsession (1976) written by Paul Schrader and starring Geneviève Bujold, Cliff Robertson and John Lithgow. In a career often spent paying tribute to Alfred Hitchcock with the likes of Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and Body Double, Obsession even today stands as De Palma’s ultimate fever dream homage to the director who’d made Bernard Herrmann a household name as the romantic master of musical suspense during an eight film collaboration, no more so than with 1958s Vertigo. Yet Obsession’s reincarnation of that masterpiece showed just how devious De Palma always was in his admiration, cloaking a truly seditious plot twist that would’ve given even Hitchcock pause within sleek, star-filtered visuals. Obsession remains his most fervently romantic, and dare one say innocent attempt to recreate the studio gloss of a time when outright violence and sex were left to the mind’s eye, its rage and sensuality truly made explicit in its music. It’s a powerful, stylistic subtlety that increasingly made Obsession into the filmmaker’s most discerning cult film.