Tronthaim – The Symphony of the Great City

Daniel Dorsch, 39 and Sascha Moser, 38 are Tronthaim, a Berlin-based band whose latest project caught our eye. They have composed a score to the 1927 silent film “Die Sinfonie der GroßStadt” (Symphony of the Great City). Shirley Hottier reports on a live performance of the piece in Berlin.

On Friday evening, in the dark and arty small courtyard of the Berlin Mitte Central Kino, about fifty white plastic chairs were still waiting for the audience to gradually take their places. Some grabbed a beer, others a famous local Club Maté while the white screen remained blank, the piano and turntables ahead of it stood silent.

As the open-air projection of Die Sinfonie der GroßStadt, Walter Ruttman’s  1927 black and white silent documentary and it’s depiction of 1920’s Berlin started; Daniel Dorsch and Sascha Moser discreetly began to get ready

Tronthaim have performed “Die Sinfonie” on many occasions; during the Notti d’Estate festival in Florence, at the music fair MIDEM in Cannes, at the Forte Riga festival in the Latvian capital and in both Lisbon and Paris for the Salon du Livre. They also played the piece as part of Berlin Days in the Oslo museum for architecture and opened the 50th anniversary of the cinema Delphi in Berlin.

But tonight we are just beginning as the pair kicked into the first act of the five. On screen, a steam train brings the spectator through the Berlin countryside and then it’s suburbs as the first notes from the duo wrapped around the courtyard. Arriving at Berlin Hauptbanhof (the Central Station), the excitement was palpable. Berlin seemed asleep and deserted, slowly waking up as it would first thing in the morning.

The one hour performance flashed past as the shots of those people, those old fashioned cars, trams, horses, cheeky kids and workers all intertwined with Tronthaim’s electronic symphony.

The notes pose and perfectly fit the images. They are the noise, the speech and the air of that old Berlin which paradoxically sounds familiar and contemporary. It indeed  does embody and transcribe the normality of that Great City, adding a certain anachronism between the past and the present. Indeed, just as one can feel while wandering in the Streets through the ambient nostalgia of East Berlin, the anachronism applies to the whole city.

The notes still sink showing Berlin, where no wall ever separated families, friends nor country. Where as the evening sets in, the inhabitants savour oysters and seafood before going to the numerous theaters and cabarets. Beers and cocktails soak those naïve characters and their common happiness suddenly moves the spectator. Six years after this lightness childish and sweet life, History would put the city in the middle of the darkness, and Berlin would hypothetically disappear to become Germania, a megalomaniac’s urban project for the capital of the third Reich.

But this day finishes as it began. Slow, quiet, innocent as the music comes to a stop. It’s already over. It’s time to rediscover the city, and become agian, part of the modern day Symphony.

Tronhaim will perform Die Sinfonie der GroßStadt at Kino Central, on Wednesday, September 26th – 8.15. If you are Berlin-based, be sure not to miss it.

More information on Tronthaim and the project can be found here

To read the article in Shirley’s native French head to her brand new shiny blog here