Live orchestral experience at the movies with Hitchcock

Vertigo & Psycho

Live orchestral experience at the movies with Hitchcock & the NZSO

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra is teaming up with Alfred Hitchcock to present a unique movie experience featuring a live symphony orchestra.

In A Symphonic Night at the Movies (Michael Fowler Centre, 26 November), the NZSO plays back-to-back performances of Vertigo and Psycho’s full orchestral soundtracks while the films play on the big screen.

Talented composer Bernard Hermann scored the music for many of Hitchcock’s greatest films, working closely with the director to create some of the best movie soundtracks ever composed.

The shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is one of the most famous moments in film history. Intended to run without any music at all, Hermann insisted on adding his iconic stabbing chords creating a sequence of screeching violins, violas, and cellos in an original all-strings piece titled ‘The Murder’. Afterward, Hitchcock reportedly agreed that it vastly intensified the scene, and nearly doubled Herrmann's salary.Contrasted against searching, driving phrases Hermann’s Psycho soundtrack unnerves and excites even the staunchest listener.

Earlier in the evening the NZSO will also present a screening of another iconic Hitchcock film, Vertigo (1958), voted the ‘greatest film ever made’ in the influential international film magazine Sight & Sound. Of the seven Alfred Hitchcock films he scored, Hermann considered this to be his best. With hints of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Die Walküre, the motifs of this score work hard to create arguably one of Hitchcock’s most suspenseful works. The obsessive themes of the film are expressed in stalking, circling music that builds an incredible sense of tension accentuated by this live orchestral experience featuring 83 NZSO musicians.

New Zealand conductor Hamish McKeich, just named the NZSO’s Associate Conductor for 2017, will be carefully synchronising the music. “I’ll have to get that shower scene just right!”

Feel your heart pound in time with staccato strings and let your senses be overwhelmed in this impressive convergence of sound and screen with your national orchestra, the NZSO.

Please note that the Vertigo screening will be at 6pm and the Psycho screening will be at 10pm.

ENDS

HAMISH MCKEICH Conductor

HITCHCOCK Vertigo

HITCHCOCK Psycho

Soundtracks composed by Bernard Hermann

WELLINGTON | Michael Fowler Centre | Saturday 26 November
Vertigo, 6pm | Psycho, 10pm

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