Int. Brucknerfest 2025: Atalante Quartet - Film? Music?

The Atalante Quartet explores film music (with and without film) from five different perspectives.

Who needs the movie when you have the music? The Atalante Quartet asks itself this question, taking five different perspectives.

The focus is on Bernard Herrmann, who made history with his music for films such as Citizen Kane and Taxi Driver, but above all for those by Alfred Hitchcock. In addition to his iconic score for Hitchcock's Psycho, the rarely heard string quartet Echoes is also a dedicated work of 'absolute music'. Philip Glass' string quartet "Mishima" also stands between the stools: a piece for the concert hall, for which the composer drew on his music for the film of the same name, a mirror image of Samuel Barber's Adagio, which only became world-famous through its use in countless films.

Upper Austrian composer Helmut Schmidinger sheds light on the subject from yet another perspective by performing the feat of writing 'film music without film' in his new work.