For ardent lovers of noir film music who frequent this site (which admittedly might only be me), I have been remiss in not passing along the news that the brilliant Bernard Herrmann score for the Nicholas Ray film On Dangerous Ground starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino is going to be re-recorded by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with arguably the best interpreter/conductor of classic film scores, William Stromberg, at the podium. It's the only certifiable noir film Herrmann conducted unless you choose to count some of his Hitchcock offerings like Vertigo and The Wrong Man.
The new recording was commissioned by Intrada, a company of ambitious film music lovers that market soundtrack CDs of all kinds out of Oakland, CA. Intrada briefly had a brick and mortar store on the corner of Polk and Vallejo in San Francisco, but now operate exclusively online. In the late 1990s, the company produced a spectacular new recording of Herrmann's score for Jason and The Argonauts (the original recorded elements were lost).
In more recent times, they have conducted successful Kickstarter campaigns for new recordings of classic scores to Dial M For Murder (Dmitri Tiomkin) and Black Patch And The Man (Jerry Goldsmith). Stromberg served as conductor on both projects and will again for this recording. Fans of Herrmann generated donations exceeding the goal of $50,000 on Kickstarter and actually raised another $10,000 that will allow additional recording of Herrmann's muaic from The Man Who Knew Too Much, which only had a scant amount written by the composer even though he conducts the orchestra for Arthur Benjamin's Storm Clouds Cantata in the climactic scene. That will be a welcome addition just for the main title music, one of Herrmann's best. And just to note, it will not include the cantata, nor will it revive Doris Day's Que Sera Sera.
Stromberg has conducted numerous Herrmann scores over the years in association with fellow classic score aficianado John Morgan and they are all considered definitive. They include Fahrenheit 451, The Kentuckian, Jane Eyre, Garden of Evil, The Egyptian and Mysterious Island. He has also conducted re-recordings of several Erich Wolfgang Korngold adventure films such as Adventures of Robin Hood as well as Max Steiner's Charge of the Light Brigade, Adventures of Don Juan, King Kong and Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, among others.
The On Dangerous Ground recording sessions are scheduled to take place this fall with a CD release sometime in the first half of 2023. It's something worth waiting for ... the original musical elements were released on CD several years ago by Film Score Monthly but the poorly presevered master is tinny and brittle. FSM did the best they could with it, but it's not something one would pull out and play regularly. The new recording should be thrilling. Can't wait.
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