North By Northwest
Today, Varese Sarabande announced our recording of Bernard Herrmann's brilliant and classic score for the film North By Northwest. I've been sitting on this since July. Couldn't breath a word of it. Happy to be released from the bonds of prerelease silence!
I'm really excited about this recording. We went to Bratislava to work with the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra. (Until currency exchange rates simmer down, our days in Glasgow with the RSNO will remain a memory.) An enormous amount of work went into this recording. Christopher Husted painstakingly reconstructed many cues and recopied ALL of the parts (a Herculean task.) Robert Townson set up the recordings to be right after my Lyon concert and before he had to go to Ubeda for the festival there. We had TWO days to record the whole thing, over 65 minutes! I spent a huge amount of time immersed in the original recording and while it is simply impossible to reproduce over an hour of music perfectly from a tempi standpoint, that was at least the goal.
This is a fantastic, fun, rollicking and unconventional score. A Spanish fandango written in 3/8 is the basis for most of the action sequences. In this (and most) cases, a bar of 3/8 is conducted as one beat, so imagine trying to keep your place as the bars one beat long are literally FLYING by. Not for the faint of heart. Herrmann was a gutsy guy, no question. Jonathan Allen from Abbey Road did a wonderful job recording the orchestra and I remixed the record here at my studio with help from my colleague and friend Rich Breen.
The result is a record made with an enormous amount of care and energy, made with the respectful intention of preserving and promoting this great composer's work. Robert Townson deserves a world of credit in his devotion to the great masters of film music and creating recordings that will well represent the music for generations to come. And hopefully this recording is one worthy of the music and one you will all enjoy!