Professor Van Hell-Sing   Maggie Nichols
Count Dracula             Nick Stephens (double bass)
Jonathan Harker           Mark Thomas (french horn)
                          /Alan Tomlinson (trombone)
Nina                      David Wilson (oboe)
Renfield                  Jon Corbett (trumpet)
Prof Van Helsing          David Fitzgeral (cello)

Conductor                 Robert Morgan

The Angel of the Odd Orchestra
The Odd Opera Chorus

There's a lot of it about. This showing of Murnau's Nosferatu with live new
music was distinguished by the fact that the musicians improvised. The
major roles in the film were played by specific solo instruments, and had
their own themes assigned by the music director. They generally performed
solos when their character had a subtitle, and otherwise played a thematic
role in the ensemble. A small group of strings and the choir also
improvised around texts and themes provided -- everyone had a synopsis of
the film, with timings and outline tenchiques to use. In addition, the
music for the high points of the film was composed in advance so that it
all came together reasonably often, whatever happened with the
improvisation. For example, Dracula building his travelling coffin and
hopping inside was scored with a comparatively conventional string scherzo.

The performance took place in the scrubbed wood lecture theatre in the
Royal Geographical Society and had the format of a lecture by Professor Van
Hell-Sing on vampirism. The film was the professor's slide show. Van
Hell-Sing sang text corresponding to the narrative in the film's titles, in
a language which might have been Transylvanian and with donnish gestures.
(A counter-tenor, possibly Phil Minton, also sang to represent the mystical
symbols that both Renfield and Dracula read.)

I think odd is probably the best word for the result. The frame, which
included academic hooligans as in The lost world, wasn't quite funny
enough, but it seemed to prime some of the audience to treat the film as a
joke. On the other hand, the film itself is an uneasy mix of expressionism,
symbolism and melodrama, so a further dislocation of tone was worth a try.
Similarly, the music was uneven. It often sounded on the verge of falling
apart, though that too could be justified by the film's expressionism. But
it also provided a breathtakingly effective climax in the last ten minutes,
and some other bravura passages.

Maggie Nichols was almost convincing as Van Hell-Sing. She sounded as if
she was saying something, and swaggered professorially. Nick Stephens looks
like one of the long-nosed eyeless bespectacled bureaucrats that Chris
Riddell used to draw in The Economist. But he played the role of Dracula
gleefully, making the double bass sound amazingly tormented and sinister.
Alan Tomlinson on the trombone did a splendid rendition of the town-cryer's
announcement of the plague, again obviously enjoying being able to make all
kinds of sounds that brass players aren't normally allowed to, and also
making the instrument act without trying to emulate the voice in any way.

The Angel of the Odd have also done Pandora's Box in this way. It's
certainly exciting, both because it could go wrong and because the
performers are putting much more into it than usual. And with a film like
Nosferatu that leaves so much open, it works to have music that creates
divergent dramatic effects instead of a neat and tidy score that tells you
what to think. It's such a brilliant film, though, that it could survive
almost any treatment that didn't go to great lengths to undermine it.