VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

With its soundtrack studio operation in Killermont Street maintaining a new income stream for Scottish musicians and its regular concerts with screenings of popular block-busters, the RSNO might seem to have the movie-music market sewn up in Scotland.

The screen arts have a long history, however, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra found a work that exactly matched its own pedigree in its 90^th birthday year.

With very busy film music specialist Ben Palmer on the podium, James Whale’s 1935 opus Bride of Frankenstein, featuring Karloff as the Monster and Elsa Lanchester in the double role of writer Mary Shelley and his newly-created mate, was the perfect date movie. It is one of those rare instances where a sequel outstripped the original, and one of the chief reasons Bride is rated over Whale’s earlier Frankenstein is Franz Waxman’s superb soundtrack.

The composer had begun his career as a writer of film scores in Germany and fled to the US after he was beaten up by Nazi thugs. Whale had admired his work on Fritz Lang’s recent Liliom and in creating the through-composed score for Bride of Frankenstein, Waxman created a template for the horror movie genre and soundtracks in general.

There is a lot of music for the orchestra to play in the film’s hour-and-a-quarter and the SSO did so with great elan, while Palmer steered the ship with precision, matching images and the film’s sound perfectly. The video projection of a sparkling print of the film was similarly spot-on.

As well as onscreen, there were excellent individual performances on the stage, on keyboards from Lynda Cochrane and throughout the percussion section, especially timpanist Gordon Rigby, providing the heartbeat that drives the narrative of the long laboratory scene. Waxman’s writing is always gloriously orchestral though, with brass and horns crucial to the most dramatic moments of the storyline, and the SSO strings, guest-led by Kate Suthers (another important soloist), on top form.

Quite evidently the conductor knows this score very well, but the technical execution of the music was nonetheless of the very first rank, especially from an orchestra for whom this was an unusual, if not unprecedented, event. The adaptability of the SSO to anything it is asked to do is often admired, and as it celebrates being 90 years young, this was another stunning example of that strength.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Ben Palmer by Arturs Kondrats