On 14 September Neil Brand’s 74-minute score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail appeared with the New England Film Orchestra conducted by Gina Naggar, in Lowell, Massachusetts.
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.
Blackmail will make its Luxembourg debut in March 2026 with Frank Strobel and Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg – one of the world’s celebrated silent film orchestras. It made its Macedonian debut in September 2024 with students from the Fame’s Institute, conducted by Mirian Khukhunaishvili and in collaboration with the National Cinematheque of North Macedonia, as part of the Silent and Classical Film Festival in Skopje.
In October Brand’s score for another eerie Hitchcock silent – The Lodger – makes its Brazilian debut in São Paulo. The screening 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’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.