Resurrecting Frankenstein and Dracula

In 2015, I became friends with David Huckvale on Facebook. David is the Author of James Bernard: Composer to Count Dracula (amongst other books) and while writing this book, he became friends with the Great Composer. I discovered, to my delight, that he also had copies of most of James Bernard's original Hammer scores in his Attic. As a part time composer and life long Film Music and Hammer fan, I suggested doing recordings using Midi software and Sample Libraries. It might not be real, but its the next best thing. David thought it a great idea and agreed to send me the cue sheets via E-Mail.

So, I started the Film Music Midi Group and took upon the task (or Labour of Love) of hand notating all of The Curse of Frankenstein score into midi software and creating a realistic sounding Virtual recording. I was so pleased with the results that I immediately moved on to doing the same with Dracula. The process was, David would send me photos of each cue sheet and I cropped, rotated and collated them all, ready to start the laborious job of entering the score, note by note into my Midi software. Sadly, I found out during this Project, that two cues were lost. The Main Title and Dracula's Rage. Undeterred by this though, I set about reconstructing these lost cues by ear. This is an arduous task and is done by forensically listening to the Film audio and writing down every note as you hear them. A bit of music theory and knowledge of the score comes in useful during this process. For these scores, James Bernard uses the Whole Tone Scale and the Dracula motif is cleverly made up of a Tritone (Known as The Devil's Chord in Musical History). Each cue took about a week to reconstruct. During all of this process, I had a lot of important people watching. Viewers that included James Fitzpatrick and Nic Raine, who both do incredible Film Music recordings with The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. Briefly, over the coming months, James Fitzpatrick contacted me telling me that he had a client, interested in producing World Premiere Recordings of these Classic Hammer Film scores. So, on request, and with David Huckvale's permission, I sent all of James Bernard's cues (including my two reconstructions) to James Fitzpatrick. That was in September. Leigh Phillips (the orchestrator) has now almost completely Orchestrated The Curse of Frankenstein which basically means it can be handed to the Orchestra ready to play at any given time.

UPDATE: April 15th 2018

The recording sessions for "The Curse of Frankenstein" and "Dracula" have been completed.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1603626043066613&id=100002576978541&ref=m_notif&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic

World Premiere recording now available on CD.

http://www.tadlowmusic.com/2019/09/dracula-the-curse-of-frankenstein-james-bernard

http://www1.screenarchives.com