Ensemble Phoenix Basel — Nosferatu
As a composer and filmmaker, Jannik Giger is used to exploring and overcoming the boundaries between genres. Projects by and with him always bear his unmistakable signature. His affinity with film allows him to set Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's classic “Nosferatu” to music sensitively and coherently, without ever becoming bold or illustrative.
For his new setting of the silent film classic “Nosferatu—A Symphony of Horror” (1922), which was premiered at the Bern Music Festival in 2017, Giger drew on set pieces from soundtracks to films by David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock as well as fragments from Franz Schubert's romantic sound world. These reminiscences haunt the score, on the one hand as played samples and on the other as new compositional creations for 14 instrumentalists, thus linking the historicity of the film with the present of its performance. In the transformation of these traces of the sounding past and their juxtaposition with live musicians, Giger blurs the dividing lines between real and virtual sound production. He dissolves the conventional film-musical orchestral sound by overwriting it with a collage of alienated orchestral sounds. This creates an intoxicating sensuality of sound and fits cleverly into the poetic imagery of Murnau, underlines the dramaturgy of the film, and yet remains an independent unit of meaning. Furthermore, Giger's composition repeatedly identifies its level of quotation as such and thus becomes a reflection on the nature and effect of film music.
Tickets are CHF 15-35, CHF 10 for holders of Colourkey, and free for kids under age 12.
Website
ensemble-phoenix.ch/#a-4826
Where
Gare du Nord
Schwarzwaldallee 200
4058 Basel