On 5 October Neil Brand’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) makes its Brazilian debut in São Paulo. The outdoor screening at the Auditorio Ibirapuera opens the UK-Brazil season of culture, celebrated by the British Council and Brazil’s Instituto Guimaraes Rosa. João Maurício Galindo will conduct the Orquestra Jazz Sinfonica in Brand’s 90-minute score.
Brand discusses his music for The Lodger here It is scored for an ensemble of flute, bassoon, horn, a pair of clarinets, one percussionist, piano, and six strings. Brand’s music for the central character is crafted to reflect the ambiguities and uncertainties that attend him in Hitchcock’s story, based on the 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes.
The 1927 silent was Hitchcock’s third feature and is an eerie hunt for a serial killer targeting London’s sex workers, redolent of Jack the Ripper. It foregrounds many of the technical and thematic preoccupations of Hitchcock’s later movies: anxieties around sexuality and authority, the trope of the “wrong man”, and an experimental approach to lighting and photography. Ivor Novello - matinee idol, composer, and singer - plays the title character.
Brand’s soundtrack was commissioned by Criterion Video to launch the second annual Yorkshire Silent Film Festival in 2017, with the live orchestra conducted by Ben Palmer. It accompanied a special restoration of the movie by the BFI Archive as part of their Hitchcock Nine project and marking ninety years since its release. The Lodger is available to purchase on DVD and Blu-ray; included as a special feature is Brand’s piano score for Hitchcock’s 1927 feature Downhill, which also stars Novello.
On 5 November The Lodger returns to Geneva, where Philippe Béran will conduct it with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande; he previously presented the piece there in June 2024 with Lemanic Modern Ensemble. In 2023 Béran and the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana opened the Locarno Film Festival with the score; it has also appeared with Ben Palmer and the Babylon Orchester Berlin. This summer saw Béran conduct Brand’s latest silent film score, The Winning of Barbara Worth – again, in Locarno with Orchestra deal Svizzera Italiana.