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)