At Lesley College’s Marran Theater last night, clarinetist-conductor-arranger Thomas Carroll led the Arpeggione Ensemble in a nicely realized reduction of Hans Erdmann’s compiled score for the debut of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in 1922. The many motivic numbers [see breakdown HERE] fell into place effectively. Though not many cues that required precise, on-the-beat coordination with the images, Carroll’s conducting fitted Erdmann’s romantic, stormy, scary, fantastic elements effectively, and the players seemed to revel in moments when the score overlayed multiple motifs in an Ivesian manner. Aside from some iffy work in the upper strings, we commend the ensemble’s embrace of period style and the decidedly non-camp approach. And they made plenty of sound in the dry, carpeted hall seating maybe 200. Clarinetist Carroll projected with HIP authenticity, Joshua Rubin’s bass clarinet licks compelled our attention in romance and fright, and various percussionist doubled the town-crier’s drumming and impersonated a sinister clock. At the 1860s Mason-Hamlin reed organ, George Wiese glued the ensemble together and soloed in an infectious Scottish number.

Rather steep raking allowed for great sightlines to the large screen, and the light spill from the music stands interfered very little, though we saw no true, deep blacks. Perhaps the audience took Carroll’s encouragement to interact with the screen too much to heart. In the first half especially, a loud contingent laughed and tittered whenever Nosferatu (Count Orlock) popped onto the screen, and they also rewarded the seriously meant, theatrical depictions of romance with inappropriate sniggers. Murnau’s “Symphony of Horror” is not the “Rocky Horror Show.” After intermission the crowd settled in somewhat and did not laugh as the plague reduced an old sailing vessel into a ghost ship. Nor did they find the procession carrying victim’s coffins funny. Many in the audience did not warm to the photoplay genre’s broader-than contemporary expressiveness. While one may certainly laugh at Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle (though they each had their poignant moments, Nosferatu benefits greatly from audiences’ accepting the conventions of the time and suspending disbelief. In the 1920s people still had memories of death from the Great War (as well as rats in trenches) and the Bubonic Plague still ran rampant in certain parts of the world. Perhaps this proximity to death induced Murnau to portray the fear of death so chillingly in this film.

One can applaud the Arpeggione Ensemble’s zeal to reach past the footlights, but preferring not to be distracted by nervous audiences, this writer is going to keep his Murnau Stifftung BluRay. It looks great on my theater screen, and its full-orchestra rendition of the complete Erdmann compilation under Bernd Heller’s direction sounds very polished and supportive.

“Founded in 2022 by flutist Andrea LeBlanc and clarinetist Thomas Carroll, Arpeggione Ensemble builds community through joyful, accessible, and immersive chamber music performances. Taking inspiration from the 19^th-Century Mendelssohn Quintette Club of Boston, Arpeggione musicians are a collective of specialists in performing music of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries on historical instruments, both with original instrumentation and in period and newly penned transcriptions of larger works for small ensembles.” Read more on the ensemble and the show HERE.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer