Concerto Macabre
Published:
COMPOSERS: Bernard Herrmann
LABELS: Koch
CATALOGUE NO: 3-7609-2
No year is complete without a new Bernard Herrmann compilation, but this time we have something original.
Concerto Macabre is a series of pieces which Herrmann reworked from his film scores, and they are clinching evidence – if any were needed – of his quality as a composer tout court. Here is his charming and quintessential American score for The Devil and Daniel Webster, which he wrote a few months after Citizen Kane, and which won him an Oscar.
And here, among a clutch of short but vibrantly original pieces, is his Debussian elegy For The Fallen, commissioned for the New York Philharmonic in the dark days of 1943. Under James Sedares’s baton the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra plays superbly.