Miracle of Flowers with live music by Christine Ott & Mathieu Gabry (Snowdrops)

Max Reichmann’s feature film Das Blumenwunder (The Miracle of Flowers), released in 1926, featured narrative and ballet sequences, alternating with plants filmed in fast motion. Maria Solveg Matray, a star of the small screen, and dancers from the Berlin Opera play the roles of flower nymphs. Withan idealism imbued with a mystique of nature, these goddesses from a Nordic pantheon appear to children. They teach them that plants have a life of their own, but in a different time than human.

The multi-instrumentalist and virtuoso of the Ondes Martenot offers organic, dreamlike music that marries the images of Max Reichmann’s film with a musical tropism. Accompanied on stage by Mathieu Gabry (Snowdrops, The Cry), the duo weave a score between impressionism, repetitive music and deep listening that reveals both the mysteries and the magic of nature.

Original score composed by Snowdrops:
Christine Ott: Ondes Martenot
Mathieu Gabry: Keyboard

Christine Ott
Christine Ott is a French composer considered to be one of the great exponents of the ondes Martenot, one of the very first synthesizers. A pupil of Jeanne Loriod, Christine has worked as an “ondiste” for a number of orchestras, performing the classical repertoire of Messiaen, Honegger and Varèse; she was a member of Yann Tiersen’s group for ten years and has collaborated with Tindersticks, Radiohead or Syd Matters. Christine Ott developed her personal career at the dawn of the 2010s. She has released 5 solo albums in a repertoire that ranges from impressionist classical to experimental, and which is regularly compared to works by Brian Eno, Rachel Grimes and Michael Nyman. In 2011, she scored the film La fin du silence by Roland Edzard (Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes), and has also collaborated with other film-makers such as Martin Provost and Claire Denis. Her music, intense and sensitive, always has a unique cinematic dimension.

Mathieu Gabry
Before devoting himself fully to composing music, Mathieu Gabry worked on a number of projects in the audiovisual, museography and architecture fields (Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Monumenta Anselm Kiefer…). Guided by a certain symbiosis between image and sound, he wrote the music for Manta Ray by Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng in 2018 (Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival – best Orrizonti film). In 2015 he formed the duo Snowdrops with Christine Ott, and together they developed a deeply personal approach to composition and orchestration. The chamber music collective presents a unique combination of classical, jazz, electronic and ambient music, and Snowdrops has released several albums to international critical acclaim. Also behind the jazz trio The Cry and Theodore Wild Ride, Mathieu Gabry is preparing his first solo album, to be released in 2025 under the name Sohlberg.

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