Review: Graeme Stephen’s Metropolis ft. The Fiona Winning Quartet

The Soundhouse Winter Festival opened with a masterclass in musical architecture, as Graeme Stephen reframes Fritz Lang’s dystopia with an organic, genre-blending score.

Silent cinema was never truly silent, but few films scream for volume quite like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Originally paired with Gottfried Huppertz’s Wagnerian, operatic score, the film is a towering monument of German Expressionism—a visual assault of Art Deco skyscrapers and steam-powered nightmares. For the opening night of the Soundhouse Winter Festival at the Traverse Theatre, however, Scottish guitarist and composer Graeme Stephen offered a different kind of volume: an intimate, intricate soundscape that felt no less epic for its modest orchestration.

A Vertical Tyranny

Lang’s vision is a study in vertical tyranny. High above the clouds, the wealthy “thinkers”—led by the austere Master of Metropolis, Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel)—frolic in eternal pleasure gardens and towering offices. Deep below, the “hands” toil in subterranean grimness, slaves to the Moloch-like machines that power the city. The fragile equilibrium is shattered when Fredersen’s son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), falls for Maria (Brigitte Helm), a spiritual leader preaching patience to the underclass. But chaos truly reigns when the mad inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) kidnaps Maria, creating a robotic doppelgänger to incite a self-destructive revolution that threatens to drown the workers’ own city.

Scottish guitarist and composer Graeme Stephen offered a different kind of volume: an intimate, intricate soundscape that felt no less epic for its modest orchestration.

It is this binary world of heights and depths that Stephen, leading a sextet featuring drummer Tom Bancroft and the acclaimed Fiona Winning String Quartet, has chosen to rescore. He wisely avoids competing with the on-screen capitalist patriarchy threaded through the original Huppertz composition. While his pulsing electric guitar provides the composition’s heartbeat, Stephen is remarkably ungreedy with the spotlight. He allows his dystopic, catchy melodies to migrate freely through the ensemble, building a musical architecture as structural as the film’s set design.

An Organic Musical Architecture

Rather than a binary switch between jazz swing and modernism, the score plays as an organic suite, weaving elements of classic and modern traditions into a fluid whole. It captures a restless energy, almost swinging one moment before slipping into a polyphonic tone poem, catching onto a new melody and sliding rhythmically after the action unfolding on the big screen.

The musicianship required to sustain this for the film’s two-hour runtime is immense, and the ensemble did so in style. Tom Bancroft brought innovation to the percussion, serving as both the provider of the industrial beat defining the workers’ grim existence and the engine of their burgeoning revolt. The Fiona Winning String Quartet were outstanding, gelling perfectly with Stephen and Bancroft to deliver a wonderfully harmonic sound. They delighted in Stephen’s unquestionably cinematic themes, playing tirelessly and with precision throughout the marathon performance to bridge the gap between the film’s operatic scale and the band’s chamber-jazz reality.

The musicianship required to sustain this for the film’s two-hour runtime is immense, and the ensemble did so in style.

Timeless Imagery and Modern Mirth

Visually, the film remains a staggering feat. Karl Freund’s cinematography and the groundbreaking “Schüfftan process” special effects still possess the power to awe, turning the city into a character as vital as Helm’s dual performance as the saintly Maria and her chaotic robot double. Though, it must be said, the modern eye finds new unintended comedy in the darkness: the “Sodom and Gomorrah” sequence, where the male elite lose their minds over a “new erotic dance,” is now laugh-out-loud funny, a moment of camp hysteria that the audience embraced with glee.

Strangely enough, the comedy wrought by the passage of time only increases the similarities to the work of Wes Anderson, who so frequently weaves absurd comedy through his juxtapositions of fabulous imagery side-on to reality. Stephen’s score leans into this connection, propelled by catchy modernist themes that soften the edges of Lang’s “Head, Hands, and Heart” philosophy. While the idea that the heart must mediate between the ruling brain and the working hands is hardly a democratic ideal by modern standards, Stephen’s music emphasises the universal struggle for humanity within the machine.

Stephen first premiered this score at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. That the project has lived on to open the Soundhouse Winter Festival nearly a decade later speaks for itself. Ultimately, seeing Metropolis on the big screen remains a pilgrimage for cinephiles, but this was more than a screening. It was a dialogue between 1927 and 2025, thrillingly mediated by an innovative score and a crack ensemble. A fantastic, memorable opening to the festival.

Featured Image: Graeme Stephen – Metropolis