City Halls Glasgow 1/11/26
BBCSSO, Antony Hermus (conductor)
Something a bit different for the concert of the night of Sunday 1st November in BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s 2026-27 season: a chance to see the 1960 classic black-and-white Hitchcock thriller ‘Psycho’ in Glasgow’s City Halls, while Bernard Herrmann’s iconic score was performed under the baton of film music expert Ben Palmer. Film with live orchestral score has been a “thing” for quite a while now, but this was my first experience of it, and I have to say that there can be few films more ideal as an introduction to the experience. The orchestra’s associate leader Kanako Ito led the all-string orchestra (for the film music is thus scored).
‘Psycho’ was, by any standards, a low-budget production, but Hitchcock managed to make a virtue out of the frugality and so, in turn, did Hermann. A tense atmosphere is sustained by clever camerawork that keeps placing the filmgoer in the shoes of the characters one moment, then as a guilty uncomfortable voyeur the next. This is unsettling, as nothing seems quite right. The music achieves something similar by equally simple means. Using just strings, almost always con sord., allows the music to work less obtrusively and almost subconsciously. Much of the music is composed of small repeating cells, which can be arranged differently, thus playing with familiarity and unfamiliarity. The cells often start in a home key and finish outside it, which is unsettling and sustains the sense of dislocative tension.
There must be hundreds of movies that have ‘a’ shower scene. Yet the three words ‘The Shower Scene’ can mean only one scene in one movie. That, exactly that, is what we mean by ‘iconic’. The mutes come off, of course, for the high-pitched stabbing shrieks on the violins. The movie pivots on this point. Up to there, we are with Marion, the precarity of her love life, her unstimulating office job, her initial struggle with temptation, then the theft and absconding without a plan, drifting off the highway in a rainstorm, facing the suspicion of a patrolman, stopping at the motel, rethinking and deciding to return the money. After the shower scene, we are with the people trying to make sense of what happened, blundering about, getting there in the end. We know but we can’t tell them. The music is with us every step of the way. Terrifyingly simple, really.
‘Psycho’ is not my favourite Hitchcock film. Nor is it my favourite Herrmann score. It’s not even my favourite Hitchcock/Herrmann collaboration (that would be ‘North by Northwest’). But it is an absolute cracker and has whetted my appetite for film with my favourite orchestra (oops, I may have said that out loud). The next chance with the BBCSSO is in January on the afternoon of 17th back in Glasgow’s City Halls, with a possibly even more iconic classic, Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi dystopian masterpiece ‘Metropolis’, with a Wagner/Strauss-influenced score by Gottfried Huppertz. I’ll be back.
Link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e3ngfx