Ensemble Phœnix Basel

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888 – 1931) / Jannik Giger (*1985): “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” (1922/2017)

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 Murnau’s classic “Nosferatu” to music in a sensitive and coherent way, 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, Jannik Giger drew on set pieces from soundtracks to films by David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock as well as fragments from the Romantic sound world of Franz Schubert. These reminiscences haunt the score, on the one hand as played samples and on the other as compositional recreations for fourteen 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 sound collage of alienated orchestral sounds. This has an intoxicating sonic sensuality and fits cleverly into Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s poetic imagery, underlining the dramaturgy of the film and yet remaining 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. (Moritz Achermann)

Program

Concert in collaboration with the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), class for electro-acoustic composition Germán Toro Pérez

Mario Davidovsky’s “Synchronisms” are masterpieces of instrumental music with playback tape, which we had already planned in 2020 but were unable to perform due to the coronavirus. Instead, a double LP was created. For the new edition of the idea of playing Davidovsky’s music in concert, we were able to win the ICST of the ZHdK as a co-production partner. This collaboration will result in seven new compositions by students for the same instrumentation.

Mario Davidovsky is one of the great figures of American New Music – but has hardly been played in Europe. As a pioneer of electronic music, he was already working at the “Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center” in 1960. His work includes by far not only electronic music. His most famous works, the “Synchronisms”, a series of over a dozen works written over a period of more than 40 years, have influenced generations of composers. In combining “classical” instruments with pre-produced electronic sounds, Davidovsky, unlike many other composers of this genre, is not interested in special “sound effects” in any way, but rather seeks a fusion of instrumental sound with electronics, resulting in both continuity and intrinsic musical expression. The earliest “Synchronisms” date from a time when today’s sound technology was still in its infancy, but they are nevertheless masterpieces without equal; the long time span in which the “Synchronisms” were created also documents the technical progress in this field over the time. In addition to a large number of awards for his work, Mario Davidovsky received the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 explicitly for his work “Synchronisms No. 6”.

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In Memoriam Peter Eötvös (2.1.1944–24.3.2024)

We are planning a memorial concert for the important Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, who died unexpectedly on March 24 this year, with three ensemble works that Eötvös wrote over a period of 32 years. Our guest conductor is the Hungarian composer, clarinettist and conductor Gregory Vajda. He has been the program director of the “Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation” in Budapest since 2018.

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An immanent musical-theatrical firework spectacle for and with Svea Schildknecht.

György Ligeti’s only opera “Le Grand Macabre” is based on a play by the Belgian poet Michel de Ghelderode, one of the most important representatives of absurdist theater alongside Eugène Jonesco, Alfred Jarry and Samuel Beckett. The arrangement of three arias for coloratura soprano and ensemble was written by Elgar Howard, who was the study director of the premiere of the opera at Stockholm in 1978. The German composer Manfred Stahnke, who studied with Ligeti in Hamburg and now teaches composition there himself, wrote his work “Lumpengalerie” in 1999, based on a recorded improvisation that was reworked into a sextet. The South Korean composer Unsuk Chin wrote the ensemble piece “Gougalon” in 2009 after a visit to the suburbs of Seoul in memory of the old, impoverished neighborhood of the 1960s where she spent her childhood. She describes the work as “imagined folk music”.

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