Collaborations with the Berlin Philharmonics
From A Diary
THE GUARDIAN, 03. September 2003
Goebbels premiere - proms 56
Royal Albert Hall, London
As in their first prom the previous evening, it was the contemporary work
at the centre of Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic's programme
that really captured our attention. Just as the performance of Ligeti's
Violin Concerto had been more compelling than either the Bartok or the
Stravinsky, so on the second night, the British premiere of Heiner Goebbels's
Aus einem Tagebuch offered far more than Rattle's Brahms or Strauss.
The Goebbels was the first Berlin commission under the Rattle regime;
the world premiere took place last March. The title, From a Diary in English
Translation, gives away the autobiographical origins of the 25-minute
piece, though there is nothing explicitly descriptive or anecdotal about
the music.
The "diary" is a collection of musical soundbites from the full
range of Goebbels's existing works, recorded in rehearsal or performance
and carefully documented. Played back through a sampling keyboard, they
provide the connecting thread through the 19 sections of the new work,
whose orchestral complement lacks violins, violas and cellos.
The absence of cushioning strings gives the soundworld a penetrating edge.
The wiry tangles of sounds are underpinned by the contributions from the
keyboard: one of these is based upon the sound of an ashtray scraping
on a steel guitar from Goebbels's theatre piece Max Black, while others
are abstracted from his magical, Beach Boys-inspired Hashirigaki or the
percussive ricochets of Black on White.
There are the familiar excursions into brassy, jazzy territory, with sinuous
oboe solos over what sounds like a sampled recording of a lion's roar
(the percussion instrument, not the real thing). The conclusion is a brooding
brass processional that finally gutters out in a flute solo. Aus einem
Tagebuch is as allusive and elusive as Goebbels's music always is, though
it needs to be heard again in a concert hall where details don't disappear
into the void.
An orchestra as steeped in the 19th-century Austro-German tradition as
this one could have played the rest of the programme in its sleep. Neither
performance sounded quite as routine as that, but Brahms's St Anthony
Variations is the kind of piece in which plush, velvety string tone and
generous phrasing get you a long way.
Strauss's Ein Heldenleben is a different kind of challenge. The performance
had none of the aristocratic hauteur that Karajan famously brought to
the score with this orchestra, but its larger-than-life detail - wonderful,
pirouetting violin solos from the leader, Daniel Stabrawa, dependable
brass, bright woodwind - had a showy intensity, if not much suggestion
of an emotional core.
(Andrew Clements)
THE INDEPENDENT, 04. September 2003
Prom 55/ Prom 56: Berlin Philharmonic/ Rattle, Royal Albert Hall
(...) The new piece in Rattle's second programme brought us down to
earth with a bang. Heiner Goebbels' Aus einem Tagebuch (From a Diary)
might serve as a kind of urban soundtrack to our impatient times. An intricate
stream of "samplings" from a single keyboard provides the impetus
for what is essentially a "big band" sound. It's almost jazzy,
almost funky - would that it were wholeheartedly either. The "new
music" packaging seemed almost an incumbrance.
THE INDEPENDENT, 07. September 2003
The Hamburg crew? Pass me my ear plugs please
Prom 59/ Prom 58/ Proms 55 & 56, Royal Albert Hall, London
(...) It fell to the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle to show
that contemporary orchestral music can move beyond the long shadows cast
by Stravinsky. In Heiner Goebbels's Aus einem Tagebuch - a far more substantial
and original work than the Salonen - the conceits of musique concréte
blossomed into a bittersweet trip-hop lyricism through a dialogue between
the virtuosic double-basses of the orchestra, Goebbels's eclectic industrial
sampling, and the edgy, oily core ensemble of tuned percussion, harp,
piano, woodwind and retro-styled brass. With the ecstatic oboe of Albrecht
Mayer as our Charon, this was a journey through Stygian waters as stone
after stone of fragmented recollections and musical impulses were dropped
experimentally into the still pool of sound, and, oddly, was the best
moment in this orchestra's Proms 55 and 56. That Rattle's Strauss is not
to everyone's taste is self-evident - my suspicion is that, as a reluctant
convert himself, his super-rational readings are too much geared towards
converting other non-believers - hence the cruelly premeditated jackboot
stamp of a boo that was heard as the reverberations of the final chord
of Ein Heldenleben were still pressing through the auditorium. Boo if
you must, whoever you are, but wait 'til the chord has cleared.
(Anna Picard)
THE NEW YORK TIMES, 17. November 2003
The Berlin Philharmonics Returns, Energized by a Dynamic Leader
(...) Friday night´s program began with the United States premiere
of "Aus einem Tagebuch" (2003) by the German composer Heiner
Goebbels. Structured in 19 continous sections, the work is meant to reflect
a diary of the mind, and the moody, volatile music - eclectically scored
for winds, brass, percussion (including piano and sampling keyboards)
and string basses - did convey a quality of shifting mind states and preoccupations.
There were wailing blasts of brass, hammering rhythms in the percussion,
ominously lurching themes in the basses, funky spirals of obsessivly repeated
figurations. You could not imagine the Berlin Philharmonic of Herbert
von Karajan´s day tearing into such raucous msic with this much
abandon.
(Anthony Thommasini)
SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE, 24. November 2003
The sheer expressive range this affords is astonishing, as the two evenings'
programs amply demonstrated. Monday evening began with a new work, Aus
einem Tagebuch (From a Diary) by the German composer Heiner Goebbels,
an intriguing and often extremely hip series of linked vignettes featuring
the interaction of the orchestra with recorded sounds (a sort of "diary"
of sound-experiences from the composer's life and career), here controlled
by a pair of gum-chewing gentlemen at a console in the first tier. Goebbels'
background includes work in Art-Rock as well as theater, and his musical
language embraces the lick, the riff, the groove, and the sound of the
big band. Often the rhythmic inspiration is derived from the looped, prerecorded
sound in a way that admits what might seem an alien element very comfortably
into the discourse. Though decidedly anti-narrative in form, the twenty-minute-plus
work passed quickly and even beguilingly.
(George Thomson)
Alle reviews to "From A Diary"
Surrogate Cities
CLASSICSTODAY.COM (29. September 2003)
And the Beat goes on: Goebbels, Rattle and the Berlin
Philharmonic
Philharmonic Hall Berlin, Germany; Sept. 23, 2003
The series of concerts opening Sir Simon Rattle's second season as Music
Director of the Berlin Philharmonic has been a great success: much-lauded
concerts in a sold-out hall. Heiner Goebbels's 1 '/z-hour Surrogate Cities,
premiered in Frankfurt in 1994, is no exception; people were lined up
hours beforehand to garner a rare ticket. The concert was preceded by
a presentation of a music and video high school education project based
more on the work's urbanization "issues" than its musical themes.
That such a performance preceded the orchestra's rendition of the work
in the hallowed halls of the former West Berlin landmark (40th birthday
party just wrapped up) is typical of the institution's new mood of opening
up now that Rattle has taken over.
Surrogate Cities explores the nature of cities using texts by Paul Auster
and Heiner Müller, and other passages inspired by motives from Franz
Kafka and Italo Calvino. The orchestra members did not dress in tails
and long skirts, just black shirts and trousers; the lighting was used
theatrically - spotlights, occasionally complete darkness, lights moving
up and down the walls, the only constant the little lamps on individual
music stands. The scene is constantly in movement - the soloists wander
on and off stage, sing from off stage. The Philharmonic always looks aware
and involved, but here there was lots of foot tapping, smiling and looking
around when others were playing.
It is hard to describe the constituent elements of Goebbels's eclectic
music: rock beats and jazzy passages, quotations from earlier classical
works, dynamic build-ups using the entire orchestra, contemplative moments
for one instrument and sampler. Heiner Goebbels specializes in collages
of sound and text, in overlapping layers of meaning. He uses a sampler
to record sounds, music, words, insisting on combining sampled sounds
with live music to "build a balance between stereotypy and liveliness."
The light show (with Goebbels himself at the console) was relatively discreet
in this performance, perhaps due to the hall's possibilities, though it
has played a larger role at other venues.
The evening's soloists were simply sensational - no hyperbole.
David Moss's role is for a speaking voice, and from the outset somberly
speaking Auster's text describing a city in constant transition ("A
house is there one day, and the next day it is gone"), his voice
went through many rapid-fire transitions, creating a kaleidoscope of vocal
acrobatics. Reminiscent of Tom Waits in his jerky movements and hypercool
aura, his presence dominated whenever he appeared. Trained as both singer
and percussionist, he occasionally interrupted the vocal tirades to break
into a few drumbeats on the little drumset set up in front of him. Rattle
too played a theatrical role, turning away from the orchestra to stroke
Moss's shoulder, singing and yelling along with the dynamo.
Mezzosoprano Jocelyn B. Smith had a different kind of amazing presence.
Dressed in a form-fitting black dress, stiletto heels, and red lipstick,
her jazz and soul expertise shaped the way she sang the texts by Heiner
Müller. The Horation Songs deal with a contest for dominance between
the cities of Rome and Alba, and communicate a drastic message about killing
and being left behind, about similarities and differences, about honor
and emotion. Completely confident and on top of things, she often tapped
the offbeats with her left hand or foot, engaged with the music being
produced until she sang again. The apocalyptic sounds accompanying Smith's
dramatic songs, the fifth of the work's seven parts, were accompanied
by blue lights moving downwards through the hall in a threateningly anonymous
way.
What can be hard to follow is the larger form - will there another tuneful
passage, a jazzy one, a quiet one? What is the ebb and flow of what's
coming? The instrumental groups were often used as blocks of sound. Passages
were repeated a few times, though not hypnotically often. The concertmaster
played a solo with the sampler; a classical fragment was played on the
piano. Each of the percussion players had a major solo - and in fact,
after the performance, Rattle found his way through the strings and winds
to ensure each got a separate big bow. Six listeners did sneak out during
the performance, evidently turned off by the unusual show. But the ayes
far outweighed the nays. Throughout the hall one saw a mixed crowd of
young folks, older rock fans and the usual Philharmonic concert goers,
some nodding their heads and swaying to the catchy beats, and the audience's
response at the work's close was overwhelmingly favorable.
(Nancy Chapple)
SC-ANDANTE.COM (20th September 2003)
This is Not Your Mother's Berlin Philharmonic
Simon Rattle and his band close the 2003 Lucerne Festival with Heiner
Goebbels's hyper-ambitious Surrogate Cities.
Surrogate Cities has reached an awkward age: Having been toured, recorded
and marveled at worldwide for nine years or so, the work's confrontational
eclecticism is no longer novel. Soon the world will start asking more
probing questions - such as what, genrewise, exactly is Heiner Goebbels's
80-minute monster which uses large orchestra, performance artist, amplified
soprano and pre-recorded sound samples to suggest a quasi-archeological
cross section of urban life? And with such a dazzlingly complex apparatus,
what does it succeed in saying?
Maybe the well-heeled mainstream listeners gathered to hear Simon Rattle
and the Berlin Philharmonic at the closing night of the Lucerne Festival
weren't quite at the point of wondering these things. After all, these
were surely the most glamorous circumstances under which the piece has
yet been heard. But sooner or later, audiences will start to wonder, since
Goebbels's score, nearly a decade on, shows no sign of going into the
post-premiere eclipse that most new music suffers.
As one who has lived with Surrogate Cities for a while, I find it ever
more fascinating as an architectural entity, thanks partly to a recent
re-ordering of the movements. While "Suite for Sampler and Orchestra"
opens the ECM recording of the work, the Lucerne performance put the purely
instrumental "D&C for orchestra" first (it's third on the
CD), intelligently setting the tone for the piece as a whole: the brass
writing in this section imitates car alarms, which is not only properly
atmospheric but also demonstrates how the composer structures his movements
around short, ejaculatory motifs. The "Surrogate" movement has
been moved to the end, and its propulsive rhythms make an effective climax
to this sprawling score, which now comes together as a single entity after
the idiosyncratic fashion of Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette. Though
it's an uneasy marriage of highly individual sound worlds, Surrogate Cities
represents a marriage nonetheless.
But the piece is more poetically vague than it has any right to be - and
only seems more so with repeated exposure. We're told that Surrogate Cities
is all about humanity's need to create and destroy, but the texts Goebbels
selected tend to throw up smoke screens. Paul Aster's quasi-street smart
meditation on how nothing lasts in the city is a highly arguable notion
on many levels. (Does anything last anywhere?) Three songs set to Heiner
Muller texts about an ancient battle form, according to Rattle in his
pre-performance comments, a metaphor for the joy of urban destruction
- an idea I don't get at all. What I do get is how the Hugo Hamilton words,
as spoken by performance artist David Moss in the "Surrogate"
movement, convey the disturbing overtones of the speed-for-its-own-sake
element of urban life. So the literary success rate is one out of three.
That isn't good enough, especially in contrast to the sonic muscle of
the score, which is like film music for your nightmares - and which, at
its best, communicates on the strength of its own irrational but visceral
power.
Both on stage and on disc, Moss seems to blur the line between performer
and compositional collaborator, since it's hard to imagine the piece without
him. Though his stocky silhouette suggests a benign personality that gives
nothing to fear, in his chaotic stream of words and noises he became something
of a human TV satellite, constantly catching and bouncing different signals.
Less impressive - surprisingly so - was vocalist Jocelyn B. Smith, who
makes an electrifying impression on the ECM recording despite some distracting
vocal mannerisms. Her manner was less emphatic in Lucerne, though she
continues to handle the dense, syllabically complex text with surprisingly
little labor. Broadway diva Audra McDonald had been originally scheduled
to do the female vocals for this performance; she undoubtedly would have
delivered more vocal lushness, though I'm not sure, in a lurid account
of murders and executions, how appropriate that would be.
The Berlin Philharmonic didn't always get the piece - notes were there
but inferences sometimes weren't - which accounts for why purely instrumental
sections sometimes seemed longer than they do as played by the Junge Deutsche
Philharmonie on the ECM recording. (Maybe it's a generational thing?)
Yet the customary Berlin Philharmonic glamour definitely gave the piece
a welcome grandeur. Rattle gave one of his more technically accomplished
performances, one particularly successful in blending the orchestra's
live sonorities with sampled ones. The serpentine entanglements between
a pre-recorded Jewish cantor from the 1920s and the live instruments were
supremely effective.
Certainly, the choice of Surrogate Cities for the festival's closing night
signified how the world is changing. As Rattle put it in some pre-performance
comments, "it's not your mother's Berlin Philharmonic." But
if festivals are to distinguish themselves, even the most conservative
of them need to replace the standard closing-night Mahler symphony with
a new kind of special-occasion programming, whether it's Osvaldo Golijov's
Pasión segun San Marcos, Berlioz's little-known version of Weber's
Der Freischütz or Surrogate Cities. And that programming development
stands to have a domino effect. The fact that the Lucerne audience stood
and cheered for Goebbels suggests that Rattle might even, with the public's
blessing, truly transform your mother's - and Herbert von Karajan's and
Claudio Abbado's - Berlin Philharmonic.
(David Patrick Stearns)