Bernard Herrmann became completely obsessed with his opera Wuthering Heights, convinced that it was the work by which posterity would judge him.

In adapting it for the stage, Herrmann and his first wife, Lucille Fletcher, concentrated on the first half of Emily Brontë’s book, ending the opera with the death of Cathy. It took eight years to complete and cost him a great deal personally, divorcing Lucille in 1948 and then suffering from a nervous breakdown. The opera was never staged in his lifetime, though Herrmann conducted and paid for a recording in 1966. ‘Too civilised to represent stark Brontë emotions, but it is good to have a complete recording of an ambitious opera’, piped Ivan March in the Stereo Record Guide of 1968.

Similar thoughts ran through my mind listening to this new recording of excerpts, adapted from the opera by Hans Sørensen. It’s billed as a ‘suite from’, though ‘scenes from’ might be a more appropriate term. At just over an hour, the suite represents just under a third of the total running time of the opera, which comes in around 210 minutes.

The composer who brought such a firm dramatic touch to his film soundtracks seems less sure-footed here. Most of the music is consistently slow, though fittingly atmospheric, with Herrmann opting for a heightened form of lyrical speech rather than recitative. Too much time is spent lingering over Cathy and Heathcliff communing with the natural world: their ‘heather on the hill’ scene, beautifully written as it is, just goes on too long. The orchestral interludes, lovingly scored and not a world away from Delius, are mood pieces and no more.

There are gains and losses in Sørensen confining his adaptation to just two characters. We miss that dramatic scene where Cathy confides in Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, of her love for Heathcliff, overheard by him, with a storm brewing outside. Hearing in isolation her account of the dream of how she was in heaven but knew she didn’t belong there (track 8) robs it of its context.

Herrmann asks a lot of the two main characters Cathy and Heathcliff, sung by Keri Fuge and Roderick Williams, their voices riding over the typically prolix orchestration with consummate ease. Herrmann couldn’t have asked for a finer advocate than Keri Fuge, her voice well attuned to her character’s plight. Roderick Williams relishes Heathcliff’s great cry ‘I’m the gaunt crags / I’m the radiant sky!’; his vocal prowess is never in doubt but as to whether his civilised Heathcliff is the whole character, I have my doubts.

The recording is beautifully clear and conducted by Mario Venzago with a suitably epic touch. It was made in the Esplanade Concert Hall in Singapore and looks from a photograph in the booklet as if it had been preceded by a concert performance, always a happy sign.

Joshua Tan takes over the reins for Echoes for strings, another adaptation by Sørensen, of a string quartet penned by Herrmann in 1965. It seems like a self-portrait in many ways, largely melancholic in mood, emphasised by the underpinning of dark string harmonics, the composer looking over his shoulder recalling fragments of his film scores. The structure is held together by a quasi-rondo form, interrupted by a troubling turn, ever more pronounced on each appearance. It’s a well-crafted expressive piece of writing for strings that deserves a wider hearing in the pantheon of music written for that idiom.

Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights is unlikely to be recorded complete again, still less staged, so this recording fills an important part in Herrmann’s discography, with a soundscape attuned to the terrain from which it springs.