• Best known for his film scores for Alfred Hitchcock, including Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds, Bernard Herrmann (1911-75) had parallel ambitions to write music for performance away from the silver screen. His three-and-a-half-hour opera based on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, completed in 1951, was not staged in his lifetime. He partly funded the only recording of it. Now the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (Chandos), conducted by Mario Venzago, have recorded an hour-long suite from the opera, arranged by Hans Sørensen, played atmospherically and with top singers: soprano Keri Fuge as Cathy and baritone Roderick Williams as Heathcliff. Williams’s opening cry of “Cathy!” sets the chilling tone, with the orchestra’s brooding gusts transporting us instantly to the windswept Yorkshire moors. The suite is coupled with Echoes for string orchestra (another Sørensen arrangement, originally for string quartet). The opera doesn’t entirely sustain that first promise, or make you wish to see it on stage, but don’t pass up this chance to hear another side of this fertile composer.
