13 June 2015, Eero Tarasti, Amfion pro musica classica
Review (en)

Iitti Music Festival opened with avant-garde music: Heiner Goebbels in Finland

Yet, between these enjoyable classics we heard the world premiere of Heiner Goebbels’s Surrogate Cities (1994) on the text of Hugo Hamilton; it was a seven-minute trio version (at the piano Mikkola, on percussion the skilful Japanese Kazutaka Morita) abridged from the original, huge one-hour orchestral piece with 100 musicians, as the composer told in the dialogue with him before the concert. The text portrays urban spaces from shopping centers to slums, but this fragment was about a woman who runs through a city, which is nowhere else than Berlin. She rushes through landscapes, but why? There is an anguished and hurried atmosphere which Björkman expressed very convincingly.

on: Surrogate (Composition for Ensemble)