Pauline Adamek
LA Phil presents Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo in concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday, March 21, 2026 at 8PM.
Alfred Hitchcock’s classic drama is made all the more gripping thanks to composer Bernard Herrmann’s harrowing score, performed live by the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Sarah Hicks conducting.
About Vertigo:
Alfred Hitchcock’s most haunted masterpiece is less a thriller than a fever dream about desire, control, and the lies we tell ourselves in the name of love. Released in 1958 to polite confusion and modest box office, Vertigo has since risen, much like its own iconic spiraling motif, to the top of critical canons, famously displacing Citizen Kane in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll as the “greatest film of all time.”
Set against a mist-draped San Francisco, the film follows former detective Scottie (James Stewart) as he falls for the enigmatic Madeleine (Kim Novak), only to attempt a grotesque resurrection of her after tragedy strikes. What begins as a mystery curdles into an autopsy of obsession. Hitchcock turns the apparatus of cinema itself into Scottie’s accomplice: the famous “dolly zoom” visualizes vertigo not just as acrophobia, but as moral and psychological free-fall. Bernard Herrmann’s aching score coils around the images like perfume—romantic, suffocating, inescapable.
Historically, Vertigo marks Hitchcock at his most personal and modern. Its frank eroticism, necrophilic undertones, and critique of masculine fantasy anticipate the darker psychological cinema of the 1960s and ’70s. Stewart’s casting—once the avatar of American decency—becomes a sly subversion; here, he is weak, possessive, and disturbingly pliable. Novak, long underestimated, gives a performance of uncanny duality, embodying both ideal and victim of male projection.
If Psycho shocks and Rear Window dazzles, Vertigo lingers. It is Hitchcock’s most intimate confession: that love, filtered through obsession, becomes an act of authorship—and that remaking another person in one’s image is the cruelest fiction of all.
About Vertigo in Concert:
Vertigo – Walt Disney Concert Hall
Walt Disney Concert Hall
111 S Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, United States, 90012
