Psycho with a live orchestra has been screened at London’s Roundhouse venue, in the Camden Town district. The Roundhouse provides a suitable venue, designed to provide acoustic excellence.
The music was provided by OSP (the Orchestra of St Paul’s), conducted by Ben Palmer, and it was played superbly, and perfectly on cue, interweaving with the movie’s dialogue track and sound effects. Naturally the standout was the infamous shower scene — the murder of Janet Leigh’s character by Antony Perkins’ twisted Norman Bates — where Bernard Herrmann’s original score is played by the string section at rapid, grating and nerve-wracking pace. The orchestra played a range of screeching violins, violas, and cellos to great dramatic effect.
Movie scores either work well, fail badly or blend into insignificance. Too often these days there is a tendency to go for a popular hit. With a movie like Psycho the score is integral to the film — creating much of the tension and drama, often heralding in a darker and more intense effect as the plot demanded.
Re-watching Psycho, which this reviewer had only experienced on a television, projected onto a big screen fleshed out some of the fine elements in the portrayal of the characters by the actors and Hitchcock’s deft hand. Re-watching the shower scene it seems clear now that Leigh’s character was going back to confess and return the stolen money, and that the shower functions as some kind of “cleansing” of her guilty conscious. With the Norman Bates character, there seems a book’s worth of Freudian issues to untangle.
Psycho was a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1960. The strapline, for anyone unfamiliar with the movie, is: “A Phoenix secretary steals $40,000 from her employer’s client, goes on the run and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother.”
There is also something captivating about watching a well-made movie in black and white, where shadows and the use of light and dark can deployed to dramatic effect. Returning to the shower scene, this featured 77 different camera angles; and the 3 minute long scene included 50 cuts, to whip up the dramatic tension. Possibly this was the first depiction of a murder of this type in a mainstream movie, and it probably helped to drive the ‘slasher genera’ and its countless (inferior) movies.
The use of a live orchestra to enable the re-screening of an old movie is becoming increasingly popular, according to Variety. The entertainment experience has moved from being an occasional novelty to being a regular part of the concert-going experience. Old classic movies seem to work best because audio tracks are broken out individually. Depending on the movie choice, it makes for a thrilling experience.
In the build-up to the performance, one of the orchestra, the violinist Rachel Spencer (@rspencerviolin) tweeted: “Wahooo so excited for today’s adventures w @Orch_of_StPauls at @RoundhouseLDN 4.30 & 8.30pm.”
