The Absolute Sound Super Disc List   TAS Harry Pearson Super LP List

One of the premier composers and arrangers of film scores from the 1940s until the '70s. 

This recording of Bernard Herrmann's score to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, by Laurie Johnson and the London Studio Symphony Orchestra, was something of a landmark when it first appeared on vinyl at the end of the 1970s. It was among the very first commercially released re-recordings of a classic Hollywood film score in full -- previously, the few such recordings ever done had been released by subscription only, through groups such as the Elmer Bernstein Film Music Society; along with Charles Gerhardt's re-recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score for Kings Row, this record heralded a new era of serious commercial interest in such music, which would come to fruition in the late '90s when record companies and producers would allocate resources to the retrieval and restoration of original film score recordings from the 1930s onward.