The joint portrait displayed on the screen hinted at some of the tensions in the relationship between Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock. The irascible composer, looking like a more rotund version of Shostakovich, stares suspiciously at the camera, as if he has been interrupted in the middle of making a point; Hitchcock himself appears to be about to take cover behind his double chins.

Their decade-long partnership finally foundered during the making of the lacklustre Cold War thriller Torn Curtain (Hitch’s lordly ways had, it seems, been gnawing away at Herrmann for some time). It is our good fortune, however, that their partnership produced some of the most inspired of all film music.

This concert — conceived by the New York producer Danny Kapilian and narrated by the actor Kerry Shale — was a fascinating and hugely ambitious attempt to do justice to Herrmann’s protean talents, blending extracts from other, non-Hitchcock commissions, from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver. Not content with displaying storyboard images and movie stills, Kapilian had the bold idea of setting the BBC Concert Orchestra alongside a quirky small group featuring that ultra-introverted guitarist Bill Frisell and the reeds player Marty Ehrlich.

Committed Herrmann fans may well have been perplexed by the presence of the jazzmen. To my mind, though, Frisell is more interesting as a collaborator than as a leader in his own right, and there was something to be said for hearing a circle of improvisers carry us far beyond note-for-note re-creations. It didn’t entirely work in the end — Frisell and Co often seemed a peripheral presence — but it was a brave notion, all the same.

Elsewhere, the Concert Orchestra, under Joel McNeely, wasn’t always able to reproduce the grandeur of the original screen performances. But the long sequence from North By Northwest was suitably manic, and Psycho’s shower scene never lacked for icy horror. If some of the scores were for completists only — the generic hunting horns on Marnie come instantly to mind — it was a genuine thrill to be reacquainted with Herrmann’s restless yet elegant contribution to Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. The film was judged a failure; the music is anything but.