"Herrmann was the master craftsman of film music"
J. Lovins | Missouri-USA | 11/13/2000
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Cary Grant and Eva Maria Saint dangle from the faces of Mount Rushmore and a plane chases Grant through farm fields, plenty of plot twists are mixed with tongue-in-cheek humor...what do you have? Plus one of the greatest directors ever to sit behind the camera with one thing in mind, to keep you guessing as the suspense builds, there's only one Alfred Hitchcock for "North By Northwest" (1959)...and there's only one composer who could pull it off, Bernard Herrmann.Herrmann composes the "MAIN TITLE" as a "kaleidoscopic orchestral fandango (spanish dance of South America) designed to get the audience ready for what is in store as the plot thickens. Musically unrelated with other themes of the score is the "ROMANCE ON THE TRAIN", beautifully haunting as we first hear in dialogue between oboe and clarient, then taken up by the strings, wonderful harmonic passages prevail.Miklos Rozsa spoke once of Herrmann's "unblending principles", and nowhere were these more in evidence than in his wholehearted devotion to the cinema. From 1955 to 1964 the Herrmann/Hitchcock teaming yielded one masterpiece after another, during the elaborately-choreographed pursuit and fight to the death on Mount Rushmore - a musical cue Herrmann wittily dubbed "On The Rock"!Total Time: 36:52 on 12 Tracks...Varese Sarabande VSD-47205...(1980)"
Definite goosebump material
Michelle Holland | Texas | 05/03/2000
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This is an AWESOME CD. True, it doesn't have as many tracks as the more recent version, but it still gets the job done nicely. The opening track is not to be missed, and the love theme will leave you breathless."