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)

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, 21.07.2003
JOURNEYS INTO A STATE OF SOUND
Back in Brisbane, Surrogate Cities by the German composer
Heiner Goebbels received its Australian premiere at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.
Surrogate Cities is a metropolis built from black dots and big ideas, and the audience is its residents. The journey through 10 suites is as sprawling, maddening, confronting and beguiling as life in a major city. And the music is as polyglot as what you would hear walking down George Street, veering from torch-song jazz to industrial noise, from hip-hop to the recorded voice of a cantor floating above strings.
Goebbels has thrown everything at constructing his sound and vision: an orchestra, two singers, sampled sounds and all sorts of objects to ruffle or bash, from newspapers to bunches of birch. In turn, the Queensland Orchestra and singers Jocelyn B.Smith and David Moss threw everything they had at the audience/residents. There were moments of beauty that dazzled and soared like the Chrysler Building, moments of percussive urgency and threat, as if we were about to be mugged, and many moments where beauty and menace coexisted.
The most extraordinary performance was by David Moss, whose improvised vocal turn lay somewhere between scatting and scary. Think Jim Carrey doing an impression of Ella Fitzgerald while being eaten by the creature from Alien.
If the greatest measure of a city's impact on its residents is how much they rave about it - rhapsodising,criticising, questioning - then Goebbels has nailed the effect of steel and smog on flesh and blood with his composition. The opening night audience could not stop talking about what they experienced in Surrogate Cities. That Brisbane has hosted its Australian premiere may also indicate how much this city has grown up.
(Scott Bevan)

COURIER MAIL, 21.07.2003
Review
Concert: Surrigate Cities. the Queensland Orchestra
Venue: Concert Hall, QPAC, July 18
The size of the house suggested that Brisbane audiences may have been daunted by the idea of Heiner Goebbels' "sonic boom" of a piece, Surrogate Cities, which opened the Brisbane leg of the Queensland Biennial music festival on Friday.
It will be a opportunity badly missed if similarly adventurous and entertaining Biennial events attract only average crowds.
True, Surrogate Cities is big, perplexing, even overwhelming. Just how do you respond to 90 minutes of great slabs of sound, interspersed with episodes such as a Burt Bacharach -like torch song that culminates in the phrase: "his tongue shall be torn from his mouth"?
It's not the sort of work the Queensland Orchestra usually tackles and it was hard to tell if the players had entered into the spirit of the thing. The front desks of the basses and the ever-reliable percussion gave it plenty but despite the urgings of conductor Andrea Molin, others seemed to be in "efficient but dour" mode. However, relieved smiles at the end suggested that perhaps the dourness had actually been fierce concentration.,
Surrogate Cities draws on large forces, but structure and texture were remarkably clear. Goebbels avoids the trap of piling complex rhythms and colours on atop the other until the whole becomes a sonic blur and any structural complexity purely academic.
Amid driving rhythm and towering canyons of sound were surprising moments of beauty - Bach-like piano over what sounded like a distant harmonium of car horns, long soprano notes that suggested the call of urban wolves then, later, evoked Mahler-like soul searching.
Unsurprisingly the work is full of German business - all kinds of musical echoes of that country's perennial struggle with the mix of its cultural heritage, its fast-track, technological, urban present and the unavoidable Nazi ghost in the corner.
Surrogate Cities is as much a piece of music theatre as a symphony. John Rayment's and Willi Bopp's lighting and sound design, and Ali N.Askin's sampled sounds shored it all up, but the real dramatic meat was provided by singers Jocelyn B.Smith and David Moss.
Moss brought just the right degree of matter-of-factness and humour to the spoken sections, which might in lesser hands have sunk to depths of archness and pretentiousness.
Smith, too, brought virtuosity and an acute theatrical sense to the penultimate three-song suite the Horation. Ranging musically from pounding battle music worthy of any sword-and-sandal saga, to the aforementioned torch song, it was a truly epic performance, doing justice to an epic work and a bold festival launch.
(James Harper)

NATIONAL ARTS MAGAZINE, REALTIME
The City of Cities
Heiner Goebbels: Surrogate Cities
The Queensland Orchestra and Soloists
Conductor: Andrea Molino
QPAC Concert Hall, July 18
The perspective of the 'Sampler Suite' [in Surrogate Cities] is the vertical section of the city: we are offered a look underground at the sewers, the inner workings of the city, at urban history, at what lies buried beneath the surface, at ruins that reveal glimpses of history-like the Scarlatti quotation in the Allemende or a chorale evocative of the Baroque in the Guige. As digital memory the sampler is an ideal vehicle for human memory. Heiner Goebbels, CD Booklet Note
Alfred Hitchcock once wanted to make a film about a day in the life of the city, likening it to the human body and concluding with sewage spewing into the ocean-as if to say, this is all our riches come to. Heiner Goebbels' massive orchestral evocation of the city ends in a different murkiness, the will to survive in the city-"No matter how many times it must always be the first time./In the city, the best approach is to believe only what your eyes tell you.../One step and then another step and then another that is the rule./If you cannot bring yourself to do even that,/Then you might as well just lie down right then and there/And tell yourself to stop breathing" (Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things). The words fade, the collective breath of speaker, singer and orchestra evaporates-stillness, grim reflection. The city can waste you.
There is other than human and architectural waste in Surrogate Cities, not just the historical detritus Goebbels invokes via quotation and suggestion. It's there in the mechanical rattle, static, hum and distant rumblings of our electronic overworld, the deepening buzz of the everyday, the garbage of surplus coded noise, so familiar we ignore it, until composers and the sound artists use it as the raw material of their creations. They make us mindful of the density of the aural ether we inhabit-its peculiar beauty and ugliness, even its ecology. This noise is a recurrent, nervy presence in Surrogate Cities, but only one layer of the city that Goebbels conjures.
As in Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino's great literary forbear to the symphonic Surrogate Cities, the city is a set of possibilities and speculations, of reverie and wild imaginings. Cities are different in different places, a city is radically different within itself, its totality illusory. The Enlightenment ideal of an ordered, organic city akin to the human body has seemed impossible to sustain since the growth of the industrial cities of the 19th century. These continue to be the creations of aggregation, of conurbation, in which town-planning is essentially a rear-guard action. City growth is still deemed organic, most recently by the proponents of Emergence Theory, but in more complex and multi-layered ways than hitherto imagined-the city most certainly has a life of its own, which we can only share. Goebbels is the ideal composer to realise a multi-layered vision of the city as history, as living cultural artefact and possibility. He doesn't flinch from its ugliness, he embraces its romance and drama, celebrates our tentative relationship with this thing that seems now barely of our own making. The scale and dynamism of the city is portrayed in a monstrous 5 chord motif that suggests awe and anxiety, and, with the sustained, lush string and brass orchestration often suggests an archetypal film noir score-the jazz-inflected, narrative-driven charm of the flowers of city evil. There are echoes of Claus Ogermann's shimmering string orchestra, big-city scorings. There are sharp chord series that alarmingly recall Bernard Herrmann as much as Stravinsky. The history of the cinema is the history of the city. But Goebbel's always rises above reference. The Horation-Three Songs, for example, juxtaposes declamatory operatic narrative, a glorious jazz coda and Heiner Muller's version of a text from ancient Rome about the murderous consequences of loyalty to a city. Jocelyn B Smith sings the songs with an intense sense of drama, switching codes with acute accuracy, finally realising a tormented jazz love lament as the tragedy of a city and a family. The unlikely layering is moving and disorienting, yielding a postmodern intensity that has moved well beyond quotation and playfulness, generating an living archaeological vision.
Throughout, Goebbels juxtaposes his dark, accessible tonality with disturbing counter elements, often from the percussion section-a manic, marching snare drum, sounds live and recorded of crashes and breakings, an insistent thump like an out-of-kilter heart beat, little squeals-like voices in the night- from the violin or viola in the midst of yearning musings. The city rattles and cries. None of these stray too far from the pulse of the work (the jolt of juxtapositions is not the primary essence as it might be in a modernist work) but conjure other places, other layers, other voices, neighbours, streets and, always, the obligatory code-switching of city life. The piano is now Scarlatti, now 'Keith Jarrett', the percussion hip (if not hop) and rock. The singer David Moss is cantorial, David Byrne-ish, Beat-cool, raving post-Berio in the mad gabble of the city. Jocelyn B Smith is one moment an ethereal vocalise muse, placed high above the orchestra, above the city; the next she plucks the microphone from its stand and leans, front stage, lovingly over us as if in the intimacy of a smoky club. Goebbels' choice is for American voices (the same artists are in therecording), not just for song, but the singular musicality of that culture's speech (out of preaching, Whitman, Kerouac, Torme too...Laurie Anderson) and its resonating association with the 20th century city. However, in another layering of cultures and histories, Moss and Smith speak and sing essentially European texts (including those by that intriguing American-European literary hybrid, Paul Auster). The ground ever shifts beneath our feet in Goebbels' cities.
Surrogate Cities is an astonishing experience, vast, insistent, passionate and memorable. It's not musically radical in the usual sense, it's working too hard on and within tradition here to be that, but it is ever provocative in its inherent theatricality and melding of disparate vocal and orchestral voices and texts into an ever-mutating portrait of the city as emblematic of contemporary life, everywhere different, but everywhere the same. Surrogate Cities is postmodernism par excellence, superb music theatre, a symphony that thinks as well as feels, a great way to start a festival of music and debate.
(Keith Gallasch)

NATIONAL ARTS MAGAZINE, REALTIME
Imagining the city: re-imagining the orchestra
Heiner Goebbels: Surrogate Cities
The Queensland Orchestra and Soloists
Conductor: Andrea Molino
QPAC Concert Hall, July 18
Commissioned for the 1200th anniversary of the city of Frankfurt, Heiner Goebbels' Surrogate Cities, a 90 minute orchestral collection, celebrates the city as a dominant way of being in the world today, proceeding on the conceit that it is possible to generalise the urban experience to all cities. Whether this is true is not certain-the experience of a city such as Frankfurt, for example, organically growing up around twisting medieval pedestrian lanes, is very different from the 'new world' car-centric cities of Australia and the USA. To approach the urban theme via an orchestral work of Mahlerian proportions seems a particularly European strategy. American composers have had similar ideas (Steve Reich's City Life comes to mind as a less sophisticated but more focused attempt), but the call for such work seems less urgent in the US, where the dominant music is all about the urban experience (try to imagine hip-hop without this theme constantly in the foreground).
Many of today's leading art-music composers would have to check an orchestration book to find the range of, say, a bass oboe (an instrument used to great effect by Goebbels, by the way). The orchestra has long since lost its place as a location of the newest ideas. Aside from the general resistance to new music amongst the majority of orchestral players, the complete reliance on notation is frequently at odds with the aims of creative music making. One feels these restraints on Goebbels in this piece, though he does his best to stretch beyond the bounds of notation-at one point, for example, the violin section play a series of sliding notes with great abandon, surprisingly unbuttoned in this context. This is an orchestra that has been re-imagined for the late 20th century-it is informed throughout by lessons from pop music, the most significant impact resulting from the integration of Willi Bop's amplification. This allows a gritty funkiness to often emerge, combining Le Sacre Du Printemps with Prince-like
grooves.
Heiner Goebbels is best known for his work in the theatre, where he has a gift for creating contexts that bring out the best from extraordinary performers. It is difficult to translate this effectiveness into the orchestral context, but his tactic of bringing highly creative soloists-vocal free-improv gymnast David Moss and the gospel-bluesy Jocelyn B Smith-pays off. Their freedom becomes contagious and inspires the orchestral players to loosen up, egged on by the precise enthusiasm of conductor Andrea Molino.
1994 is starting to feel a very long time ago-zines, manga, "surfing the web" was dropped into conversations, musicians got excited about sampling, postmodernism felt new and fresh. Surrogate Cities, composed in 1994, often shows its age (the sampler's material particularly). The music works best when the postmodern quotation marks are removed and we hear what Goebbels really feels. This is never more profoundly moving than the inspired section featuring 70-year-old recordings of Jewish cantorial singing. The peculiarities of the Rabbis' performances filter out through the whole orchestra with a gorgeous result, but dark thoughts of Kristallnacht are impossible to avoid. However marked by its European specificity and the
moment of its making, Surrogate Cities seems likely to take its place in the late-20th-century orchestral repertoire, both creating a miniature city in sound and reflecting how it feels to live now.
(Robert Davidson)

NATIONAL ARTS MAGAZINE, REALTIME
The symphony in the present tense
Heiner Goebbels: Surrogate Cities The Queensland Orchestra and Soloists
Conductor: Andrea Molino QPAC Concert Hall, July 18
What is a city and what is our relationship to it? Can we exist in it? Can we not? A city is a place of turmoil and confrontation, an endless metamorphosis in which the individual is engaged in an ongoing struggle for psychological and emotional life, if not physical life. Surrogate Cities is a symphony that tells us about our own life and times, as city dwellers.
Written in 1994, Surrogate Cities incorporates several elements: a suite for sampler and orchestra, comprising the typical components of a suite -sarabande, allemande, courante, etc; several texts set for voice and orchestra; and the work 'D and C for Orchestra', written on those notes. It is an epic work, this rendition occupying nearly 90 minutes. The structure of the work is itself a metaphor for the city, an aggregate of forms and styles, different in its detail in each location, but following universal principles.
The music is intense and cacophanous, evoking factories, blaring car horns, the squeal of traffic, the endlessly pulsating city. The numerous percussion instruments include sheets of metal plate, rattled and hammered as if we live in a percussive world. Listening to this work can be as overwhelming as the busy city itself. The few quieter passages are the more potent-we know they are the calm before the returning storm. The orchestra and singers were all microphoned, and the public address system relayed all the sound, so that the audience heard it from 2 sources. As well as doubling the aural intensity and diffusing the sense of directionality, the use of the PA symbolised the technology of our culture, placing it in parallel with the pre-recorded samplings.
The music of soloist David Moss's own ensemble was amongst the sampled sounds. A variety of musical idioms is heard-snare and kick-drum rhythms mimic rock; there are jazz and soul elements; there is the sound of the Jewish cantor; and a moment of Romantic piano, a brief respite from the noise, perhaps suggesting a quieter moment in one's own room. In sampling Moss' music (he is also a percussionist), the distinction between performer and composer is dispelled. The use of sampling is a well-known artistic strategy that theorists suggest characterises the postmodern, the condition in which we presently live. Here, it becomes a metaphor for the present world, an intertextual amalgam of forms, structures and histories.
Goebbels' choice of texts ranges across parables and poetry, all of which touch on the experience of being human at the end of the 20st century. He draws on Paul Auster, Franz Kafka, Heiner Muller, Hugo Hamilton and Italo Calvino to create what is in effect an oratorio on secular themes, the city now occupying the ground of the church. Hamilton's text, 'Surrogate' focuses on someone who is running, ever disconnected. The central text is Muller's three songs on the story of the Horatian, a tale of heroism in war and siblicide, wonderfully delivered by Jocelyn B Smith, as relevant today as ever in a world in which no-one is entirely innocent or guilty. Goebbels' Surrogate Cities recalls the great choral symphonies such as Beethoven's 9th, and also Shostakovitch's 14th, which (with solo voices) muses on an
existential death. These were landmark works, as is this.
Here, spoken word, taped, sampled sounds, all kinds of unusual percussion instruments, including torn newspapers, bundles of sticks being rattled, a stainless steel mixing bowl-the sounds of civilisation-bring the symphony into the present. Goebbels has managed to avoid the pitfall of many composers who try to blend heterogeneous forms, by weaving his own original form with just a few threads of others, rather than simply adding them on top of each other. 'D and C for Orchestra' is intended to evoke city buildings; these replace the forests and fields of the Romantic repertoire. It also suggests a dance, returning regularly to a pulsating theme driven by double basses and contrabassoon and heightened by a clanging triangle and massive brass forces. Passages in 'D and C for Orchestra' recall the fatal dance in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and the music for his The Soldier's Tale, with their dynamic, irresistible energies and the sense of the inevitability of the drama of life being played out. Generally, this was a splendid performance of an immensely difficult work.
The orchestral elements are frequently an amalgam of disparate sounds and textures that do not depend on thematic or harmonic development, and strict direction is required to keep the event together. Expressionistic music of this kind requires concentrated effort by each and every performer. Above the performers' heads, spotlights shone through hazy vapours to evoke headlights illuminating smog, heightening perhaps unnecessarily the theatricality of the performance. The work itself is metamorphosing, for example new elements were added in this performance and the sequence was quite different from the CD version (ECM New Series 1688 465 338-2).
The soloists were superb-David Moss's vocal range is prodigious, from baritone to countertenor. Goebbels' writing would be unrealisable without such a performer. Smith and Moss are not merely singers. Some of the texts Moss delivered were babble, a meaningless abstraction of the sound rather than the content of conversation, recalling the work of Berio, and requiring consummate skill to bring off. Smith's performance was superb; both are vital to the success of the work. On stage, their presence is dramatic, operatic in its intensity. Heiner Goebbels has created an extraordinary synthesis out a disparate array of musical forms and instrumentation in Surrogate Cities. The auditorium was not quite full-those who should have
filled the empty seats but didn't will live to regret it. Surrogate Cities is a masterpiece and a fitting opening to the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music.
(Chris Reid)

NEW YORK TIMES, 06.06.2000
Saluting Flexibility, If Not the Flag; at Spoleto
(...) The official festival concert, on Thursday, offered the American premiere of "Surrogate Cities”, a sonic boom of a symphony from 1994 by Heiner Goebels, a pathbreaking German composer. This work, everywhere amplified, draws much of its driving energy from rock. It turns the symphony orchestra on its head, so that percussion dominates; the brasses fill out the sound, and string and woodwinds often provide little more than local color.
The sheer exhilarating sonic assault, heavy with sampling and with vocal effects that could pass for it (or for percussion), is barely suggested in a new recording from ECM (which of course als forgoes the visual assault of spotlights repeatedly searching the stage and the audience). It gave one listener a first sense of what it must have been like to hear a big Mahler symphony a century ago, with the whole notion of sonic possibility expanded at a stroke.
This basic texture made all the mor striking the isolated moments of conventional beauty, like the old recording of a haunting cantoral song, gently lifted, as it were, out of the rubble. Or rubble it seemed. Literary meaning is illusive in this work, with inspiration from Kafka and dimly scrutable texts by Paul Auster an others.
That sense of finding jewels amidst rubble was enhanced by the setting of the Memminger Auditorium, an old building abandoned after Hurricane Huge blew its roof off in 1989 and partly restored for the purpose. Here was an opportunitiy for Charleston, so immersed in its ancient history (not to say heritage), to reconnect with its more recent history as well. The performance by Mr. Sloane and the festival orchestra was a knock-out, at times almost literally, and David Moss supplied most of those remarkable effects. (...)
(James R. Oestreich)

NEW YORK TIMES, 06.06.2000
Goebbels: Surrogate Cities
"The official festival concert, on Thursday, offered the American premiere of "Surrogate Cities", a sonic boom of a symphony from 1994 by Heiner Goebbels, a pathbreaking German composer. This work, everywhere amplyfied, draws much of its driving energy from rock. It turns the symphony orchestra on its head, so that percussion dominates; the brasses fill out the sound, and strings and woodwinds often provide little more than local colour. [...]
It gave one listener a first sense of what it must have been like to hear a big Mahler symphony a century ago, with the whole notion of sonic possibilitiy expanded at a stroke. [...]
That sense of finding jewels amidst rubble was enhanced by the setting in the Memminger Auditorium, an old builidng abandoned after Hurricane Hugo blows its roof off in 1989 and was partly restored for the purpose. The performance by Mr. Sloane and the festival orchestra was a knockout, at times almost literally, and David Moss supplied most of those remarkable vocal effects."

THE SCOTSMAN (02.09.2002)
City samples magnificent sound portrait
It is not that Surrogate Cities is a purely percussion piece. The full strength of the BBCScottish Symphony Orchestra is on stage throughout. But when it builds to its climax, an augmented, nine-strong percussion section have to work at full stretch to keep up.
Written by the German modern music composer Heiner Goebbels, Surrogate Cities builds A sound portrait of a modern city. It is not a literal representation, but one which examines the soul and being of a city.
Besides the extra percussion, Goebbels has written large sections of the piece for two voices. For the most part, their text adds a human level to the orchestra’s more architectural representation of the city, which seems to get right down to the groaning sewers.
He is a composer who knows that microphones are not only good for making voices sound louder, however. Jocelyn B Smith’s breathy soprano voice would simply not have been as ethereal without them. But it is David Moss who makes the best use of microphone.
Moss simply applies the principles of the human beat box from hip hop to an orchestral, classical music setting.
Goebbels’ biggest divergence from the norm, however, is to include a long central suite for orchestra and sampler. This allows him to include even more sonic variations into the already seething mix - variations which the SSO dealt with in powerful and understanding fashion.
Run ended, but the concert will be broadcast by Radio 3 on Saturday, September
(Thom Dibdin)

CLASSICAL MUSIC (21.12.2002)
Premieres of the Year
(...) This was a lean year for world premieres in Scotland, with the Edinburgh International Festival not even able to boast one. However they did stage a stunning performance of Heiner Goebbels' Surrogate Cities with the BBC SSO, conductor Andrea Molino, and singers Jocelyn B Smith and David Moss, whose improvisational raps and percussion playing were truly extraordinary. The complex soundworld of the cities we live in were evoked in an exciting fusion of baroque, jazz, rock and sampled sounds - a Pastoral Symphony for the 21st century. (...)
(Susan Nickalls)