Kurvenklänge

Classical music meets football sounds on paper like a contradiction. Out of exactly that grew the idea behind Kurvenklänge: the WDR Funkhaus Orchestra plays the great club anthems not in a concert hall — but in the middle of the supporters’ curve.

For Borussia Dortmund, 1. FC Köln, Schalke 04, Bayer Leverkusen and Borussia Mönchengladbach, the anthems were recorded directly in the stadiums — together with more than 4,000 fans. 56 musicians of the WDR Funkhaus Orchestra were not sitting on a classical stage, but on podiums between flags, scarves, flares and thousands of voices.

The films do not try to explain football. They observe something much simpler: what happens when people sing the same melody at the same time — and out of that, something emerges that suddenly feels larger than sport alone.

Between concert attire and supporters’ jerseys, between strings and fan chants, an emotional in-between space took shape: high culture meets stadium ritual. Not ironically. Not broken. But with full seriousness on both sides.

Director Baris Aladag explicitly brought Max Tsui onto the project. After several joint music and documentary works, he trusted that Max could bring into the production exactly that hard-to-grasp element that cannot be planned: atmosphere, closeness and the feeling of standing inside a moment rather than just looking at it.

It was precisely this mixture of controlled visual language and documentary emotionality that became an important part of the visual identity of Kurvenklänge: not detached stadium observation, but images that try to make the collective energy of people tangible.

The films were shot in the spring of 2015 in five NRW stadiums. During production alone the individual clips were viewed more than a million times; the finished films were officially handed over to the clubs on 24 August 2015. The accompanying making-of aired later on WDR television.

For Max Tsui, Kurvenklänge became formative not least because the films made visible something that would keep returning in his later work: not just to show people — but to make collective emotion cinematically tangible.