|
 HEINER GOEBBELS
Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten
(Landscape with Distant Relatives)
Cat No. 4765838
German Chamber Choir; Ensemble Modern; David Bennent speaker;
Georg Nigl baritone; Franck Ollu conductor
- Premiere recording of Goebbels’ opera for soloists, choir and ensemble,
Landscape with Distant Relatives
- Performed over 20 times throughout Europe
- “Consistently gripping score” ranging in style from early/ Renaissance to “teeth-baring aggression” and pounding drums (in the ‘Triumphal March’), and incorporating a Hindi chant
by A R Rahman and “about 10%” improvisation
- Heiner Goebbels’ 8th ECM album, following Eisler-material (461 6482), his masterly and charming homage to formative influence, German composer Hanns Eisler
The Music: ‘Soundtrack’ of Heiner Goebbels’ massive music theatre piece, Landscape with Distant Relatives – ‘an opera in the full sense of the term’ is how it was described at its premiere in Geneva in November 2002 – recorded at Paris’s Festival d’Automne, incorporating texts by Gertrude Stein (from Songs of Wars I have seen), Giordano Bruno, Henri Michaux, T S Eliot and Nicolas Poussin, and drawing on the services of actor-speaker David Bennent, baritone Georg Nigl, 16 further singers and 19 instrumentalists of Ensemble Modern. Goebbels says the music is “about 10%” improvised. The non-linear storyline embraces the ambiguous relationship between art and reality and the nature of political conflict. About the first performance BBC Radio 3 broadcaster and critic for The Independent, Rob Cowan wrote: “The consistently gripping score runs the gamut of styles from Renaissance tonal tapestry (incorporating early instruments) to teeth-baring aggression – including an army of drummers raising merry hell… viscerally and intellectually exciting… You sense the presence of colliding cultures. The sounds and images stay with you… the opera would surely raise a storm in the UK.”
Artist background: German composer and director Heiner Goebbels (born in 1952) is one of the most important exponents of the contemporary music and theatre scene. His compositions are performed by orchestras and ensembles worldwide, his radio works broadcast by many German stations and eight of his music theatre productions in the repertoire of Ensemble Modern, Theatre Vidy, Les Percussions de Strasbourg and artmobil are regularly seen at major international festivals, including Edinburgh. In July, Goebbels’ latest work Songs of Wars I have seen (using the same Gertrude Stein text partly heard in Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten), was premiered by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment during the RFH re-opening celebrations. The Evening Standard found it "Utterly hypnotic and quite unforgettable", the Guardian called it an "extraordinary musical experience" while The Times described "a thought-provoking, hauntingly tender work for troubled times".
|
