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Vertigo

When the shops re-opened for a time in the summer of 2020, I picked up - somewhere in Chepstow - a 4 CD box set of music from the soundtracks of Alfred Hitchcock's films. I was spooked by Oskar Sala's surprisingly abrasive & avant-garde electronic score to The Birds; I very much enjoyed Miklós Rósza's music for Spellbound; but most of all I loved Bernard Herrmann's cues for North by Northwest (which, in places, put me oddly in mind of some of Philip Glass's symphonic works) and, of course, Vertigo.

When the next lockdown came along, I treated myself to a vinyl copy of the Vertigo soundtrack (ordered via ebay) in the shape of the remastered pressing of it put out by Varèse Sarabande in 2019. Both the music and the packaging are wonderful, but the record itself wasn't in the very best of condition for a new LP, with some audible clicks and pops coming from it even when it was freshly unwrapped.

I'm not altogether sure I've ever even watched the movie all the way through. If I have, it would have been on TV a quarter of a century or more ago. Despite that, the soundtrack's initial 'Prelude' and the 'Scene d'Amour' had, by virtue of their pop-culture afterlife, become imprinted, if only faintly, in my memory; and listening to them on the CD and then the LP felt like it was half remembrance and half discovery.

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