Soundhouse Winter Festival: Graeme Stephen's Metropolis ft. The Fiona Winning Quartet

“It’s Stephen’s far-reaching guitarist-composer’s voice, now vast and scary, now dreamily delicate, now devishly catchy, that’s making this strain of his output so enthralling” – Rob Adams

Award-winning Scottish composer and guitarist Graeme Stephen presents his score for the 1927 classic silent film Metropolis. Probably the most famous silent film of them all, Metropolis is a pioneering science-fiction classic by German auteur Fritz Lang.

Since premiering this show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2016, Stephen has been awarded a PhD by composition at the University of Edinburgh. He has continued to develop his perspective on the intersection between improvisation and composed music whilst also remaining the most in-demand jazz guitarist in Scotland. His final degree show saw him working with acclaimed viola-player Fiona Winning (Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, London Sinfonietta) and we are delighted that Fiona will join him on this updated score for Metropolis.

Metropolis is Stephen’s 7th film score. He has scored some amazing silent films including F W Murnau’s Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. His composition for the F W Murnau classic Sunrise won him the Innovation Award at the Scottish Jazz Awards. In 2018 he was commissioned by Hippfest to compose a score for The Penalty, a classic movie featuring the inimitable Lon Chaney.

The Fiona Winning Quartet is completed by some of the finest string musicians playing in Scotland today: Tom Hanky (violin), George Smith (violin) and Robert Irvine (‘cello).

ABOUT THE FILM

Metropolis (1927) is included in the BFI’s list of Greatest Films of All Time (at no 67!). It is a classic of silent cinema and just two years off celebrating its centenery.

Director Fritz Lang claimed to have been inspired to make Metropolis by his first glimpse of the New York skyline. The result is the grandest science fiction film of the silent era (and for many years to come), a seminal prediction of a megacity where the masses work as slaves for the good of a ruling elite.

The DNA of huge swathes of sci-fi cinema is traceable in Lang’s production, from the mad-scientist creation of the robot Maria, which would feed into Hollywood’s Frankenstein (1931), to the imposing Art Deco cityscapes (ingeniously created using miniatures by Eugen Schüfftan), which became the model for later depictions of dystopian cities, from Blade Runner (1982) to Brazil (1985). The strikingly angular set design is characteristic of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s.

Whether you have seen Metropolis previously or not, we guarantee that this updated score by Graeme Stephen and the Fiona Winning Quartet is very much the perfect complement to this legendary film. Don’t miss it!

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