Heiner Goebbels/Junge Deutsche Philharmonie
Surrogate Cities

AVANT 18 (1/2001)
*****
The tale may be apocryphal, but I know someone who swears that while visiting the home of a friend of a friend he observed a number of ECM CDs propped up on the mantelpiece. He pointed to one of the discs and said, "That's a terrific album!" To which the householder replied: "Actually, I wouldn't know, I haven't got round to playing it. Mostly I buy these CDs for the covers." I mention this because the photograph fronting Heiner Goebbels' Surrogate Cities is stunningly beautiful, and the packaging of his CD ...is sumptuous.
When the artwork and the design concept are so strong, there's a possibility they'll overshadow the music. That doesn't happen here. Goebbels' music is accomplished and compelling, and within the last twelve months no CD of 20th century composition has impressed me more. Surrogate Cities is the seventh album he's recorded for ECM since 1980, of which only the first was an improvisation project. During the '80s he was a member of the avant-rock group Cassiber, and he had a long and fruitful association with the saxophonist Alfred 23 Harth. Since 1985, when composition became his primary concern, he's worked extensively with texts. Kafka, Heiner Mueller, Hugo Hamilton and Paul Auster are featured on Surrogate Cities, and even the prefacing quotes in the CD booklet are well-chosen quality lit.
The overall concept is cities: their contours, their history, their function, their inhabitants. But the texts selected by Goebbels make only oblique or glancing reference to these potentially very dense and refractory topics. The textless compositions 'D & C' (for large orchestra) and 'Suite for Sampler and Orchestra' address the concept in the abstract language of music. The concerns of the former are architectonic and generalisable to many cities. The tenor of the piece is established by the five portentous blows with which it begins (a reference to Kafka's story 'The City Coat Of Arms'), and which punctuate it at regular intervals. The sampler suite is concerned with stratification, slicing vertically through a city to reveal hidden aspects, subterranean layers, an archaeology of meaning. Actually, several cities are evoked by way of brief ambient samples: Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Lyons and St. Petersburg. The music samples - David Moss Dense Band, Third Person, Entouch, Otomo Yoshihide, Karl Biscuit and Xavier Garcia - are every bit as enigmatic and brief. Only the lengthier samples of a handful of Jewish cantors (taken from cleaned-up 1920s and '30s recordings) are readily identifiable as such. The suite progresses more by way of deft juxtaposition than organic development, and subtly configured Baroque quotations allude to the history of western music.
The dramatic and intense 'The Horatian - Three Songs' (adapted by Mueller from Livy's tale of moral ambiguity) is sung by soul-jazz diva Jocelyn B. Smith. She and David Moss (who performs on 'Surrogate') have disciplined voices, but their timbral range and expressivity are considerably greater than those of singers from the classical tradition. Both of them sing on 'In the Country of Last Things', which combines a narrative (Moss) about loss and uncertainty with wordless elegiac vocals (Smith). The subtlety of performance on this composition is typical of the CD as a whole.
(Brian Marley)

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE (6/2000)
Goebbels: Surrogate Cities
Much of Heiner Goebbel's work, especially his music theatre, is tightly focused - the celebration of game playing and artistic creativity in his wonderful Black on White (recorded by the Ensemble Modern on RCA), the disquisitions on travel and strangeness in Or the Hapless Landing (ECM) - but the multi-media Surrogate Cities, commissioned by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, explores a much wider Canvas. It's an evening-long collection of works that confronts the complexities of urban life, through a variety of texts and sampled sounds.
As always with Goebbels the music has an astonishing wide range of reference. Jazz riffs and rock licks constantly erupt through the surface; the textures are indefinably fresh and these are constant surprises. So the opening Suite, with its skeleton of Baroque forms, is punctuated with sound bites of city life, and overlaid with the singing of a Jewish cantor, while The Horation sets texts by Heiner Mueller with the melodic directness and memorability of songs by Eisler or Weill. And where Surrogate uses oscinatos to build up a tremendous sense of expectation before Hugo Hamilton's text is declaimed at full voltage by the astonishing David Moss. In the Country of Last Things alternates impassioned string eruptions with a laconic reading of Paul Auster's words over a smoochy pizzicato bass and a high worldless soprano.
Amazing stuff.
Performance *****
Sound *****
(Andrew Clements)

GRAMOPHONE (06/2000)
Over the past few years, the sound-world of Heiner Goebbels has gradually found its way to British audiences, providing a distinctive and valid alternative in German new music to post-avant-garde soul searching and tenuous syntheses of Krautrock and cabaret. Little of Goebbels' work can be evaluated in musical terms and "Surrogate Cities" is no exception.
This 70-minute sequence sets out with the premise, in the composer's words, to 'read then city as a text and to translate something of its mechanics and architecture into music'. Certainly the Suite for Sampler and Orchestra has the ominous sharply ironic mood familiar from earlier pieces (such is La Jalousie on in earlier ECM release), although the opening Chaconne, with its pervasive cantorial sample, fugitive pizzicatos and Verèsian brass interjections, has an emotional charge that the remaining numbers, ingenious urban evocations all, rather dissipate.
The remaining items sustain a cumulative impact, although the Horatian trilogy of songs would work well separately. Jocelyn B. Smith declaims their depictions of Roman violence with sultry intensity, to music which ranges from Rósza-like fanfares to the spine-chilling evocation of blood dropping to the be earth in the second song. D & C unleashes a typical sequence of rhythmic and dynamic confrontations, the passage of flute arabesques over gentle, circling dissonances (5'40") being an intriguing foil. Surrogate pursues a never-fulfilled crescendo of anticipation, David Moss forcing out the lyrics with an abrasiveness worthy of Peter Hammill; then reciting with complete detachment the bleak lines of urban decay triumphing over renewal of In the Country of Last Things.
"Surrogate Cities" is neither the most cohesive nor diverse of Goebbels' enterprises ("Black on White" remains the best introduction to his work on RCA 12/97). But in the present context of post-millennium blues, it makes for thought-provoking and - necessarily? - disturbing listening.
(Richard Whitehouse)

CLASSIC CD (06/2000)
Heiner Goebbels, born 1952, has had six albums on ECM, the last in 1994 . The orchestral and vocal music on Surrogate Cities offers a radical exercise in crossing musical boundaries that demands to be heard. Its assimilation of popular genres to orchestral music is found in Bernd-Alois Zimmermann, a composer with similar breadth of vision. But while Zimmermann looked to jazz, Goebbels takes from art-rock and contemporary dance genres, with sampling and percussion prominent.
Surroagte Cities, says the composer, offers a "realistic, certainly contradictory, but ultimately positive image of the modern city". But much of the project, if it doesn't quite suggest the urban dystopia of Tim Burton´s Batman films, seems too edgy to be overly optimistic. Outstanding is the Suite for Sampler and Orchestra, with movements named after those in a Baroque suite. It begins with eerie samples of Jewish cantonial singing from the 1920s and '30s, worked into tile orchestral score with an inescapable charge and resonance. Industrial textures are blended with quotes from Scarlatti at the end of "Allemande", and a chorale on "Gigue". The result makes William Orbit's Samuel Barber mixes sound tame.
The first song of The Horatian, with its chugging orchestral rhythms is wonderfully exciting, though soul-jazzer Jocelyn Smith's singing is just too overblown for my taste. The idiom here is popular but with unusual orchestral finesse. David Moss sings powerfully in Peter Hammill vein on Surrogate. Goebbels is clearly a composer who loves the big gesture. His expressionism treads a fine line just this side of posturing and bombast, uniquely both accessible and experimental. The versatile Junge Deutsche Philharmonie fully justifies its reputation as one of the leading German ensembles.
(Andy Hamilton)

THE GUARDIAN (19.05.2000)
Heiner Goebbels' evening-long collection, the result of a commission from the Junge Deutsche Philharmonic, is not so much a single, unified work as a sequence of independent pieces all worked around the common theme of urban life. There´s a purely orchestral piece, the Suite, in which baroque skeletons are overlaid with sampled city sounds and the singing of a Jewish cantor; a song cycle, The Horatian, which sets texts by Heiner Muller in a Eisler-like way; a cool reading of a Paul Auster extract delivered over a smoky pizzicatojazz bass; a spiralling wordless soprano for in the Country of the Last Things; and jagged, high-voltage instrumental ostinatos in Surrogate. The style is typically polyglot - eruptive jazz riffs jostle with expressionist harmonies, haunting melodies give away to anguished declamation. It all hangs together wonderfully through the sheer originality of Goebbels' creative personality.
(Andrew Clements)

www.muse.ie (read this review at www.muse.ie)
Violent, tender and intensely lyrical, "Surrogate Cities", Heiner Goebbels' extraordinary collection of contradictory compositions, explores the "phenomenon of the city from various sides" and tells their stories. "Suite For Sampler And Orchestra" configures samples and fragments ­ a Twenties recording of a cantor, a snatch of Scarlatti, some spoken text ­ with simple melodies and urgent percussion to construct a picture of a city, its architecture in the clanging of brass and its memories in the quotations and samples. In "The Horatians: Three Songs", Goebbels frames Heiner Muller's meditation on civic duty and power ­ "what to do with a Horatian who saves his city but kills his sister, and is both a victor and a murder?" ­ in the first two songs with a driving martial rhythm, and in the third with pulsing cello and strings. Meanwhile, Jocelyn B Smith's exquisite voice moves effortlessly from operatic declamation to bluesy croon, from the epic confrontation between warriors to the domestic recitation of the story ­ "words fall into the wheels of the world, irretrievably making things known to us or unknown."
"D&C" is an animated and dynamic portrait of a city, in which percussion, strings and wind continually collide with one another, their shimmering textures and staccato rhythms coalescing around variants on the pitches of D and C. The final pieces, "Surrogate", with words by Hugo Hamilton, and "In the Country Of Last Things", with words by Paul Auster, locate the individual within the cityscape, isolated and alienated. The pounding rhythms of piano and percussion form a jazz-inflected pulse which drives David Moss' spoken/sung description of a running woman in "Surrogate", while the nervy noirish swirl of string and lone trumpet punctuates Moss' monologue and Smith's vocal trilling. "Surrogate Cities'" seemingly disparate parts ­ Muller's adaptation of Livy and Hamilton's urban vignette ­ form an organic and sustained dramatic musical narrative, and infuse its theatrical and cinematic intensities with a compelling urgency, as much in Muller's exquisite composition as in Junge Deutsche Philharmonie's performance under conductor Peter Rundel's rigorous direction. Intellectually ambitious and emotionally challenging, "Surrogate Cities" is very beautiful and affecting collection of music.
(Jocelyn Clarke)