Frame Ensemble
Frame Ensemble is Northern Silents’ resident quartet.
In 2018, violinist Irine Røsnes, cellist Liz Hanks, percussionist Trevor Bartlett, and pianist Jonny Best improvised a score for Metropolis at Sheffield’s Abbeydale Picture House. They enjoyed playing together so much that they decided to keep doing it.
Over the last four years, Frame has acquired a reputation for creating sophisticated and inventive improvised silent film scores. Their frequent Yorkshire Silent Film Festival performances at Abbeydale Picture House include The Great White Silence (also for York Concerts and Hull Truck), The Woman Men Long For (also at Hippodrome Silent Film Festival), Eisenstein’s Strike, Julien Duvivier’s Au Bonheur des Dames, and The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe, 1897-1902. At Harrogate Theatre they’ve performed The Passion of Joan of Arc, and at Harrogate Odeon, Metropolis.
Frame has appeared regularly at York’s National Centre for Early Music since 2019, performing Nosferatu, Nanook of the North, The Phantom Carriage, and South. The quartet also made its debut at Chester’s Storyhouse with Nosferatu and Old Woollen, Leeds, with Pandora’s Box.
In September 2023, Frame made its Stoller Hall debut in Manchester with a further performance of Pandora’s Box.
“...a brilliantly effective musical commentary on the 1929 Marlene Dietrich thriller The Woman Men Yearn For (*****), so persuasively argued that it was hard to believe they were making it up on the spot.”
— David Kettle, Classical Music Critic, The Scotsman, April 2021 on Frame Ensemble’s The Woman Men Yearn For at Hippodrome Silent Film Festival.