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Concert time: "Dial H For Hitchcock", with the NSO

Tonight's concert featured the orchestra playing the soundtrack to accompany film clips from various Hitchcock movies: To Catch a Thief, Strangers on a Train, Dial M For Murder, and North by Northwest.

Can I not remember movies any more? I know I've seen North by Northwest, but didn't remember the climactic scene at all; Barb says we watched Dial M For Murder together, and none of it seemed familiar at all.

The very first item was two movements from the Psycho suite for strings, a favorite of mine; the shower music is stereotyped as shrieking, but it's actually got a neat structure, beginning on the violins and then moving down through the violas to the cellos. The music for North by Northwest is also a lot of fun: a peppy motif is repeated over and over, driving the scenes relentlessly onwards. The second half began with a collage of the Hitchcock family's home movies with the trailer for North by Northwest, accompanied by Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette", Hitchcock's theme tune.

Attendance was pretty sparse; the orchestral-level seats were only half-full, and the loge seats were maybe three-quarters full. The scattered rain that fell early in the evening also probably kept away people with lawn tickets. That's a pity, because the rain was never very heavy and stopped completely early on, and didn't spoil the concert at all.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on August 2, 2008 11:19 PM.

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