6 June 2000, NY Times
Review (en)

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."

on: Surrogate Cities (Composition for Orchestra)