Songs of Wars I Have Seen

THE TIMES (July 16, 2007)
Songs of Wars I Have Seen
Richard Morrison at Queen Elizabeth Hall
It's the orchestral premieres with add-on extras – theatre, poetry, film – that have most interested me over the past decade. Of course, these genre-blurring events require far more organisation than run-of-the-mill concerts. But I believe they point to the future.
Heiner Goebbels, the 55-year-old German composer, has been a quirky pioneer in this field, notably with his 1996 work Black on White, which sent an orchestra dancing around the stage. His new work, Songs of Wars I Have Seen, is just as impressive: 50 minutes of gently mesmerising music-theatre.
This time the players stay seated. But they still have to multitask. Goebbels's inspiration is Gertrude Stein's book Wars I Have Seen, written in France during the Second World War. It comprises quietly ironic observations about the tragically recurring nature of warfare, as perceived through the eyes of women stoically going about their daily chores.
Goebbels allots these spoken comments to the women musicians in the ensemble. Playing strings and woodwind, they are grouped closest to the conductor and are quaintly illuminated by table lamps. More harshly lit, the men sit at the back: symbolically wordless but menacing on brass and percussion.
The score, admirably conducted by Sian Edwards, also reflects this duality by using both the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the new-music specialists of the London Sinfonietta. Because Stein refers to Shakespeare's masterly insights into warfare, Goebbels incorporates elegiac snippets of Matthew Locke's 1674 score for The Tempest. But here they are played through an electronic mist – like music dimly heard on a wartime wireless, or like warnings that echo faintly down the centuries yet still go unheeded.
Otherwise the music is acerbic and descriptive, redolent sometimes of 1940s jazz, elsewhere of mayhem lurking around every corner. It suggests ordinary people clinging to the vestiges of everyday life as armies and politicians trash the world around them.
It ends stunningly. As the lights dim, a trumpeter plays a slithering, discombobulated solo – a cracked bugle call? – while all the others placidly vibrate bowls on their laps, producing an endless, ethereal hum. I was reminded of Hardy's line: "War's annals will cloud into night ere their story die." A thought-provoking, hauntingly tender work for troubled times.

EVENING STANDARD
Brilliant Battle Cries
HEINER GOEBBELS has a knack of creating unique, mesmerising works of music theatre that linger in the memory. His latest, Songs of War I Have Seen, was given its world premiere under Sian Edwards last night (recorded by Radio 3 for future transmission).
It was prefaced by Biber's Battalia, which represents the sounds of war and drunken revelry in music and still sounds avant garde more than 300 years after it was written, and Goebbels's Schlachtenbeschreibung (Battle Description), which sets Leonardo da Vinci's vivid verbal representation of a battle scene.
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and London Sinfonietta, joined forces for Songs of War: the men formally attired at the rear, with the women casually dressed at the front in a quasi-domestic setting complete with boudoir lamps.
Texts from Gertrude Stein's Wars I Have Seen were read by the women, a tricky task they pulled off with aplomb — not least the hilarious nonsense story of a chicken told by the harpist, Helen Tunstall. Stein's characteristic repetitions, suggestive of history repeating itself, and her tone of curiously momentous banality, are captured brilliantly in Goebbels's draggy syncopations and multi-layered, genre-crossing idiom. His music incorporates excerpts from Matthew Locke's The Tempest, as well as elements of jazz, rock and more besides.
While Songs of War has a limited visual dimension, it ends with a superb piece of theatre. As the lamps are dimmed, the women brush glass vessels to produce an otherworldly, bell-like sound, while a solo trumpeter (the excellent Paul Archibald) unfolds a keening microtonal lament like an incantation. Utterly hypnotic and quite unforgettable.
(Barry Millington)

THE GUARDIAN (July 16, 2007)
Songs of Wars I have Seen
A new work by Heiner Goebbels is one of the most beguiling experiences contemporary music has to offer. His finest pieces, more than a dozen of them now, defy categorisation, for Goebbels blurs the boundaries between music and theatre, and rock, jazz and classical traditions more consistently and potently than any other composer alive.
As always, a simple description hardly conveys the imaginative power with which Goebbels brings together the most unlikely material and makes it merge in a unique and unforgettable way. Songs of Wars I Have Seen, commissioned by the Southbank Centre, was composed for the combined forces of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, who provide the strings and most of the woodwind, and the London Sinfonietta, who supply the brass, percussion and keyboards. It is a meditation on the effects of war on women, refracted through extracts from Gertrude Stein's memoir of living in Vichy France during the second world war. The women in both orchestras take turns to recite the texts - touching, mundane, comically surreal - in an intimate, conversational style that builds into an incantation akin to a Greek chorus, while their colleagues, conducted by Sian Edwards, conjure the sound environment around them.
The juxtaposition of modern and period instruments brings a built-in historical perspective to the music. But Goebbels underlines this with excerpts from Matthew Locke's 1674 score for The Tempest, so that his own music, with its insidious rhythmic samples and haunting melodic riffs, unpredictably slips across four centuries. Such moments could seem contrived, but Goebbels makes them magical, just as his ending, with a haze of temple bowls through which a trumpet threads a lonely lament, becomes the perfect image to sum up the bittersweet poetry of this extraordinary musical experience.
(Andrew Clements)