A few years ago Tom Service of The Guardian spotted a thematic link between Monty Norman’s “Dum di-di dum dum” James Bond riff and a short orchestral piece by Jean Sibelius. True enough: Norman’s stalking bass line of two up-down semitone steps is right there in Sibelius’s Cassazione from 1904, whether Norman had heard it first or not. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Sibelius’s misty vocal work Snöfrid has much more of a spy movie feel to it than Cassazione does. Perhaps Sibelius would have made a half-decent film composer – as some of his fiercer critics claimed he should be viewed – after all.

Still, that distinctive Bond sound, its seeds sewn by Norman but the flowering tree nurtured by John Barry (and tended now, with Skyfall and Spectre, by Thomas Newman), had to come from somewhere. And just as every man of a certain age might walk a little taller when he hears that signature music, or imagine it playing through his mind as he straightens his bow tie before a corporate awards ceremony, I have my own delusions of Bond-style grandeur. They pop up whenever my iPod shuffles onto the concertante works of Ernst von Dohnányi (or Ernő Dohnányi, if you prefer). Did Barry, with his penchant for luscious orchestral music of the Romantic era, tap into the dark, stealthy world of Dohnányi’s early 20^th-century scores when forging that distinctive Bound sound?

We might never know. But first off, it’s worth establishing what that Bond ‘sound’ consists of. Its most tangible musicological feature, as set out by Norman’s riff, is its consistent rhythmic underlay and its toying with the interval of a minor third (think the first two notes of ‘Hey Jude’). John Barry built on that spectacularly with his score for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, employing for the first time a louche, cruising motif that allows Norman’s minor third to sidestep with confident swagger into the major. The device has been a consistent feature in Bond scores since, creating as sense of unease and mystery but also something rather sleek and luxurious, too.

In truth, such minor-major games are a pretty ubiquitous feature of art music down the centuries. But the Bond movies strip them down harmonically before dressing them in a very distinctive orchestral lacquer: heralding trumpets and soaring horns, but otherwise low, creeping brass and feline strings which occasionally sing out in a lyrical unison. That conjures a sense of inexorable power lying almost latent at the bottom of the orchestra, ready to rise to the surface when called upon – the action man in his pristine dinner suit, not breaking a sweat until he needs to.

Now, have a listen to the opening bars of Dohnányi’s First Violin Concerto – that shrouded opening tune played by a oboe with horns for support over a sinister, ticking orchestral accompaniment – and see if you notice some affinity with the way the Bond composers ‘light’ their orchestras.

No? Fair enough. That was Dohnányi in 1915, he was probably only just getting going. By the time of his Second Violin Concerto 35 years later, the dark styling in his music was more established (for a number of reasons). If you can hear the orchestral outburst at 6’40 in the first movement of the concerto (in the Michael Ludwig/JoAnn Falletta recording) and not glimpse the emergence, on the horizon of your imagination, of a Bond villain’s mountainous lair, then…well, you probably need to get back to your Bambi VHS.

What you hear there is the concerto’s main theme: angular, full of deceit and power but with a particular glint. It’s first heard on the introspective solo violin, but increasingly punched-out thereafter by Dohnányi’s granite orchestra. Right there, even its instrumentation on a burnished trumpet could have come straight out of a John Barry score.

And there’s more where that came from. Right at the start of Dohnányi’s First Piano Concerto from 1898, the orchestra spells out the first three notes of the Monty Norman bass line. In the Second Piano Concerto of 1950, Dohnányi waits a whole 45 seconds before unleashing a soaring horn tune that absolutely has the cut of a Bond theme in the way it shimmies into a surprise new tonality at its mid-point (at 0’45 in the Howard Shelley/Mattias Bamert recording) – exactly the same tonal trick that characterises the ‘Capsule in Space’ motif from You Only Live Twice. Dohnányi twists the kaleidoscope on his own fascinating little tune for the duration of the movement.

Perhaps it’s in his concertos, almost all of them cast in minor keys, that Dohnányi’s voice feels closest to the Bond sound: structurally, it’s far easier in these pieces for the orchestra to erupt suddenly from nowhere as it might in a film score. But there are similarly captivating symphonic, chamber, vocal and piano works by the composer too, all of which pre-date Monty Norman’s music (Dohnányi died two years before the release of Dr No).

We should remember, of course, that in Dohnányi we’re dealing with a complete and original artist who faced genuine darkness and evil: a Hungarian who constantly fought against the Nazis (they eventually executed his son Hans) before emigrating to America. We owe it to him to enjoy and analyse his music on its own terms and you might argue, with perfect validity, that Dohnányi has no link with the world of Bond beyond some tenuous and ubiquitous music coincidences. Then again, did you ever see The World is Not Enough? You might remember the unfortunate submarine commander Captain Nikolai. If you’d stuck around till the credits, you might also have noticed that character was played by a certain Justus von Dohnányi. Son of the conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, and great-grandson of the composer Ernst. A coincidence? Come come Mr Bond, we both know there’s no such thing…