The full plot of Emily Brontë’s novel makes those of Russian 19th-century epics read like Noddy. Like Carlisle Floyd, Bernard J Taylor and Kate Bush, and William Wyler’s 1939 film with Laurence Olivier, Bernard Herrmann and librettist Lucille Fletcher stayed (the odd textual borrowing aside) with the first part of the story – the tortured love affair of Cathy and Heathcliff.

Reviews of a previous recording, sponsored and conducted by the composer in 1966 (Pye, latterly on Unicorn-Kanchana, 8/93 – nla), and indeed some of this new one, chant a litany of influences – the Puccini of La fanciulla del West, Delius (because of his Yorkshire background and North Country Sketches?), Warlock’s The Curlew (a shared outdoor setting?), Holst, Korngold, Menotti…But this trawl for sound-alike scores denies Herrmann the individual timbre – jazz-influenced, American, mid-20th-century, tonal but not conservative – that cries out from his film work – Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Psycho, Taxi Driver. He scores fluently – you could not imagine Herrmann, like Vaughan Williams, wondering what to do with the clarinets in a loud tutti or, like Strauss, worrying that improvements in modern recording would ‘find out’ the lack of originality in his inner orchestral parts. Indeed, if this composer had not been so picky about performances (especially if they involved cuts), he might have had a premiere under Stokowski and a richly cast recording under Julius Rudel. But ‘live’ outings for the opera to date have been restricted to high days and holidays – like the present one given two years ago on Bastille Day in Montpellier with a largely Franco-Belgian cast.

Edward Greenfield, in his original review of the composer’s recording (3/67), found ‘nothing whatever frightening about the score’. I must disagree – Herrmann is good at the paradoxical claustrophobia of the open-air heath settings, a mood found immediately in the Prelude and repeated (again claustrophobically) in the Epilogue. Where the result doesn’t quite fire may have to do with Herrmann’s musical treatment of his libretto (itself super-faithful to the novel) with a literalness and reverence that one suspects his film music never offered the directors he scored for. This was the man who constructively built on Hitchcock’s ‘something modern and jazzy’ suggestion for Psycho to return with the radical all-strings score that sealed the scary image of that movie. In Wuthering Heights he follows the action rather than creates it. The work’s length – not overmuch at a tad under three hours – is emphasised by the large amount of slow, moody music and lower voices, and lack of real contrasts (the chorus of carollers at the end of Act 1 scene 2 is quite a significant relief).

I have not been able to hear the original recording recently enough to make valid comparisons. But suffice it to say that this performance is really excellent and natural. Altinoglu and his soloists (especially Laura Aikin’s Cathy, a big role, and Yves Saelens’s Edgar Linton) have gotten themselves wholly involved with both drama and idiom. Sound and balance (French radio) are good; only the occasional Francophone vowels in parlando passages distracts from the cast’s well-studied English.