On 13 March 2026 Neil Brand’s 74-minute score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail made its national debut with Frank Strobel and the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg – one of the world’s celebrated silent film orchestras – at the Philharmonie.
1929’s Blackmail is regarded as one of Hitchcock’s most brilliant thrillers and showcased his mastery of the silent form; its alternative version, with sound, was among the first successful talkies in cinema history. It tells the story of a London woman who is blackmailed after killing the man who forces himself upon her; it captures Hitchcock’s exploration of the power of sin and guilt as well as his fascination with crime, and those who get away with it.
Blackmail was the first British silent drama to be newly scored for full orchestra since the advent of sound. Brand’s 76-minute score takes in the influences of the key composers Hitchcock would work with across his career, with Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman, and Miklos Rozsa providing Brand with a musical toolkit; read an in-depth discussion of Brand’s work on his score for the movie here on the BFI website.
Brand notes of his score,
Hitchcock makes his musical requirements very obvious from beyond the grave, through masterly direction of the action. Like Hitch, I fell in love with Anny Ondra and tried to make the music complicit in her seduction…and I also tried to mirror Hitch’s love of London and its people, with the exception of its policemen.
Brand’s score was originally premiered in Bologna in 2008, before a UK premiere at the Barbican in 2010 courtesy of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Timothy Brock.
Strobel will conduct a further local premiere of the work on 6 May, presenting the score with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in Monaco. On 15 March Brand’s score made its East Coast debut with the New England Film Orchestra conducted by Gina Naggar at the Sommerville Theatre, Massachusetts.
His score for Hitchcock’s The Lodger will make its Swiss debut in August 2026 in Geneva, performed by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Philippe Béran; in 2023 his music to Hitchcock’s skin-crawling hunt for a serial killer opened the Locarno Film Festival, where it was also conducted by Philippe Béran.
The Winning of Barbara Worth, his most recent silent score and first for a Western, received its UK premiere on 21 March, with George Morton conducting the Sheffield Philharmonic Orchestra in the city’s historic Victoria Hall.