Music / Psycho, Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Llewellyn Hall, September 16-17. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN

There’s a real sense of film history coming round again with the modern phenomenon of orchestras playing soundtracks live to a film.

Silent films weren’t all accompanied by a single piano.

Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s disturbing Psycho from 1960 gets a stage full of strings from the Canberra Symphony Orchestra under the brisk and sensitive baton of Jen Winley and it is all quite grand.

Back in 1960 I was more inclined to be sneaking off for multiple listenings to Herrmann’s deep and resonant score for Journey to the Centre of the Earth (soundtrack recordings were rare then) and regarded Psycho as a gruesome horror film to be avoided. This concert redresses the balance.

There’s a graceful and highly suitable short preliminary in Leah Curtis’ quietly foreboding Nightfaring, a piece commissioned by the CSO from a composer with Canberra connections and an international career that includes film scores.

Then the film plays with the live orchestra.

It’s a long evening so Psycho gets an interval that only the epics like Ben Hur got back then, but the orchestra needs the break. And so, given the sardonically grisly nature of Hitchcock’s retelling of Robert Bloch’s disturbing story, does the audience.

Winley and the strings of the CSO give Herrmann’s urgent and sinister score the drive it needs as Janet Leigh’s Marion flees her job with a large amount of stolen money only to encounter Norman Bates and that iconic and terrible death in a shower.  Anthony Perkins as Norman is the crazy centre of it all.

A very satisfying evening for film fans and an insight into the making of a soundtrack.

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