Shooting chamber concerts often has something unnecessary about it because the music always wins from the images. Obligatory close-ups of the musician are intended to amplify the connection with the performers. In this video (which will be shown in a special setting) something else is going on in the recording of a performance of the eight string quartet by Shostakovich. This threatening and stirring quartet is played by musicians sitting in a hole in a gallery. The audience stands on a raised floor and looks down on the players who, sitting there, attack the poor acoustics of the white space. The cameras move between the patient observers. Sometimes they stop at an arresting detail, like the hand gently pinching another arm, or the swirling of a drink in a plastic beaker. The dramatic music contrasts with the passive, vacant attitude of the audience which reveals a whole arsenal of awkward body language. The flow of images is interrupted by the use of slow motion, stop motion and freeze frame. The interaction between musicians and audience structures the course of the tape, but the decor-like nature of the setting adds a fictionalizing dimension. As if the art of music is not enough and the presentation itself is also a graphic work, an intervention by the artist. Following the principles of Russian dolls, the recording adds an artistic layer and the contrasts between the intermeshing layers produce a kind of vagueness in the otherwise clear separation between players and observers. Despite their passive attitude, the people in the audience also become players. The impossibility of an 'objective' documentary form of recording leads to a report, constantly changing in perspective that through its demonstrative purpose becomes almost a didactic ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’.
– Willem van Weelden
|
Camera, Sound Ann Lislegaard, Nikolaj Meedom, Søren Martinsen, Joachim Koester, Editing Jeanette Schou, Joachim Koester, Musicians Julie Eskær, Sara Vallevik, Iben Teilmann, Emile Eskær, Production Joachim Koester, Galleri Nikolai Wallner
|
|
1 9 9 7 
