Film scores played at concerts by symphony orchestras are in vogue and if you were paranoid you might think the Hollywood publicity machine was behind it all.

It isn't, of course, but there is a BBC season of film music running. This concert of American movie music by the Beeb's best house orchestra confirmed the view that though fit for a specific accompanying purpose it does not necessarily stand alone without wobbling and, in a few cases, falling flat.

The best of it is evocative. If you'd never seen Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, you'd know from Bernard Herrmann's score that it was menacing and sleazy.

Herrmann was the film composer par excellence. His suite from Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a brilliant piece of compression as well as an example of how music beyond a specific theme tune can be just as important as commentary on the action.

In some music, such as Elmer Bernstein's for The Magnificent Seven and John Williams's for Raiders of the Lost Ark, the main tune, however memorable, is everything, the incidental music around it just forgettable padding.

But scores by Danny Elfman (Batman), David Raksin (Laura) and Leonard Bernstein (On the Waterfront), show how the music can have an illustrative life of its own beyond the signal theme, especially when played with the easy virtuosity of the BBCNOW.

Miklós Rózsa's concerto for Hitchcock's Spellbound (piano soloist Martin Roscoe) finds a place for the theremin, a spooky electronic instrument played here and in music by Howard Shore by its great exponent, Lydia Kavina.

This was a night ride down memory highway with a wonderful orchestra, already a veteran in supplying TV film soundtracks and here conducted spiritedly by film music specialist Robert Ziegler. The presenter was film critic Mark Kermode.