The NSO’s Soundstage Brat: A Hollywood Backstory
January 21, 2026, 7:30 p.m. the Nashville Symphony Orchestra hosted a special event with Leonard Slatkin in Laura Turner Hall at the Nashville’s Schermerhorn Center: Soundstage Brat: A Hollywood Backstory. The concert featured several film score excerpts from Hollywood’s golden era through those more current.
Concert goers had the exciting opportunity to experience the highly esteemed Leonard Slatkin who is Music Director Laureate of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Conductor Laureate of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Any one of those honors and positions is enough to merit an entire career, but that is only the tip of the iceberg of the myriad of Slatkin’s laurels. Further, he has had a long relationship with the Nashville Symphony, and we are honored to have him serve as Music Advisor in this season of change.
Celebrated conductor and “Soundstage Brat” Leonard Slatkin has also been on an extensive tour this season, leading prestigious orchestras across the United States and abroad in Ireland, Japan, and Poland. A centerpiece of his recent work is this special cinematic event with the NSO. The program highlights his deep Hollywood roots, featuring a standout performance of Miklós Rózsa’s Spellbound Concerto among others.
The evening’s program opened with Erich Korngold’s (1897–1957) “The Sea Hawk Overture.” Korngold’s music embodies what film music scholar Caryl Flinn theorizes as Hollywood’s “New Romanticism.” Flinn’s concept describes Hollywood’s embrace of nineteenth-century Romanticism during the 1930s, a time when European concert halls had shifted toward post-Romantic and Modernist composers. Korngold’s “The Sea Hawk Overture” illustrates Flinn’s theory of Hollywood’s fetishization of Richard Wagner’s representational model, where associative themes and leitmotifs drive the development of musical material over traditional form.[1]
The Sea Hawk (1940), one of the big swashbuckling pirate movies starring Errol Flynn, is a case study of classic Hollywood scores. It demonstrates the formula for music composition within the production model of the old studio system, in which the score sonically mimics every actor’s facial expression and actions, every piece of dialogue, and every camera angle, tender moment, and action shot. The score conveyed how audiences should feel and what to think at any given moment of the film through its precise succession of musical cues.[2]
A film’s overture serves as a prelude, or musical introduction, to a narrative. The Sea Hawk’s overture, sonically, tells the short version of the film’s story by stitching together a broad medley of its most important associative musical themes. The NSO brought each section into sharp relief. At the opening, the Sea Hawk fanfare, the brass section navigated a series of complex and sharply articulated rhythms through a progression of bright major-mode harmony. The audience felt the full weight of the brass and percussion during this opening, and I must add that the power of the trombone section drew my ears—their timbre crackled with energy.
During the main “Sea Hawk” theme, the string section’s rapid, surging gestures played under the brass were the perfect embellishment, adding both ornamentation and a greater sense of forward momentum. The strings’ “Floating Theme,” reinforced by woodwinds, was exquisitely played and sounded gorgeous. Also, after a villainous section, using darker orchestration, and a battle section with rapid and turbulent alternating themes by the strings under aggressive brass calls, leads back to the heroic fanfares heard at the beginning, signifying the Sea Hawk’s victory. Korngold’s overture introduction conveyed the entire film narrative: the hero, love, conflict, and victory.
The program also included two excerpts from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho (1960). In film music scholarship, Psycho marks a departure from Hollywood’s Romanticism. Maintaining the semiotic musio-visio-narrative relationship, Psycho reflects Herrmann’s later rejection of conventional melodies in favor of expansive modular musical structures. This element marks a common thread across his scores for several of Hitchcock’s films.[3]
The first excerpt was the music from Psycho’s main title, where Herrmann’s ostinatos, or fragmentary, repeating patterns, reinforce the film’s sense of obsessive paranoia. The music of this section of the film underscores the disorienting series of passing horizontal and vertical lines across the screen during the opening titles. Another departure is Herrmann’s employment of only strings, which, for this concert, allowed the brilliance of the NSO’s strings come forth. The angular form and dissonant harmony of Psycho’s score were brought alive beautifully by such a high-caliber ensemble.
The program also featured Miklós Rózsa’s “Spellbound Concerto for Piano and Orchestra” While film music has only recently become a staple of subscription series concerts, Rózsa’s concerto for the movie was so undeniably compelling that orchestras began programming it during regular season concerts as early as the mid-twentieth century—a feat virtually unheard of at the time. This inclusion honors the film’s innovative spirit, which saw Hitchcock collaborate with surrealist Salvador Dalí to visualize the subconscious. The music perfectly mirrors the narrative of Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) as she risks her career to unlock her patient’s repressed trauma.[4]
Rózsa captured this split between notions of both classic Hollywood elegance and the early twentieth century’s obsessions with psychoanalysis. The significance of the Rózsa’s Spellbound Concerto is found in the association between its restless, swirling arpeggiated and chromatic runs over weighty low-register chords and the film’s sense of paranoia and suspense. Also, this music foregrounds the theremin, an electrostatic musical instrument in which pitch and dynamics are controlled by the proximity of a performer’s hands to vertical and loop antennas. The theremin’s sound, a cross between a human voice and a musical saw, was often employed to signify the strange and “weird,” such as aliens, the supernatural, or the recesses of the human psyche.
Playing the theremin on the Spellbound Concerto was Darryl Kubian, who skillfully navigated the fine line between blending seamlessly with the NSOs’ melodic instruments while emerging from the composite texture just enough to elicit in perceivers a sense of the uncanny. Last, I would be remiss not to mention piano soloist Robert Marler: magnificent playing.
Marler’s performance was nothing short of exceptional, serving as a masterclass in psychological tension. He commanded the work’s virtuosic elements with a precision that balanced shimmering, dreamy arpeggios against grounded themes that spanned many a mixture of emotions and psychological states. By navigating these intricate, rapid figures over melodic lines that were simultaneously beautiful and disorienting, Marler perfectly captured the film’s sense of fractured memory and amnesia. His technical clarity did not just impress—it brilliantly elicited the haunting, psychological ethos that defines Hitchcock’s film. The closing moments of the Spellbound Concerto were the absolute highlight of the night, delivered with a virtuosic flourish that was truly unforgettable.
I covered these three program selections in such detail because they are the ones that made the biggest impression on me that evening. The concert also included excerpts from scores by Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004), Alfred Newman (1900–1970), John Williams (b. 1932), Randy Newman (b. 1943), James Horner (1953–2015), Hildur Guďnadóttir (b. 1982), and Hans Zimmer (b. 1957).
It was a thoroughly engaging and fun evening of world-class music. For those looking to experience the brilliance of the NSO firsthand, I highly encourage you to visit the Nashville Symphony’s website (at https://www.nashvillesymphony.org) to explore the diverse and exciting lineup of concerts remaining this season.
[1] Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princton University Press, 1992), 14, 18–19, 20, 24–25.
[2] Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (BFI/Indiana University Press, 1987), 72–75.
[3] Mervyn Cooke, A History of Film Music (Cambridge, 2008), 208.
[4] Ibid., 114.
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A Georgia native, Stephen D. Turner moved to Nashville in 2023 with his partner of over thirteen years. When he isn’t hiking in the woods or enjoying the ocean, Stephen is a musicologist and tubist who teaches music at Tennessee State University.
