Vertigo (Original Recording)(OST)

Entertainment Weekly - Ranked #16 in EW's "100 Best Movie Soundtracks" - "...A Rorschach blot of repressed pain and delirious release..."

This 1996 Varese Sarabande release of Bernard Herrmann's music from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is not to be confused with either the similarly packaged Mercury Records original soundtrack to Vertigo, or the 1995 Varese-released re-recording of the complete score; it is neither of those, nor, for technical reasons, is it the complete original soundtrack; it is the restored soundtrack from the film itself, consisting of the music recorded by conductor Muir Mathieson (as opposed to Herrmann himself, owing to a musicians' strike) in London and Vienna. Buried for decades in the materials' vaults owned or controlled by Universal Studios, those tracks -- which use a larger orchestra and have different lengths and contours than the tracks later recorded by Mathieson for the commercial release -- were found and restored as a byproduct of the early-'90s restoration of the Hitchcock movie. There are imperfections here, including the switch from stereo to mono on some tracks (the Viennese recordings were in mono), and some lack of fidelity that reflect the nearly 50-year age of the source tapes and the lack of care they were given while being stored -- and the absence of the music for the graveyard sequence, which was damaged beyond repair -- but this is still the best representation that the actual movie tracks themselves. The annotation is extensive and highly detailed, explaining why this is one of the finest and most challenging film scores ever written -- a tour de force for Herrmann -- it opens with a title track that evokes the disorientation suggested by the movie's title and it gets better from there, carrying us through various aspects of a supposedly disturbed woman's mindscape, haunted as she allegedly is by a ghost out of old Spanish California, and into one of the most impassioned love themes ever written in any medium, before descending back into the chaos of the disturbed protagonist's dark side. There are string, wind, and horn passages here, as well as an orchestral "sting" and a love theme that, once heard, are never forgotten, and serious fans of Hitchcock or the movie, or Herrmann, will have to own this CD. But they should also be cautioned that, as a result of the missing section of music as well as the technical flaws in the surviving tapes, this is not the definitive edition of the film score. For that, they may have to look to John McNeely's re-recording with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, also on Varese. ~ Bruce Eder|

ハーマンの名スコア！！ サントラ、ついにＣＤ化！！ 『めまい』（１９５８） サウンドトラック 音楽　バーナード・ハーマン 監督　アルフレッド・ヒッチコック 主演　ジェームズ・スチュアート、キム・ノヴァク ロマンスと強烈なサスペンスを融合させた ヒッチコックの名作のための、名匠ハーマンの スコアを６３分演奏・収録したスコア盤。 ロマンティックでミステリアスなムードを保ち、 めくるめく有名なメイン・メロディを軸にした ヒッチコックもののオーケストラ・スコアの代表作。 (C)馬場敏裕