This is the first collaboration between John Berndt, the Baltimore band leader, and M.C. Schmidt, one half of the celebrated duo Matmos. Both have pooled their considertable expertise in avant garde and experimental music in celebration of the comic books of Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) and “the beautiful miniatures of the SKY Records Cluster/Eno/Conny Plank collaborations”.
The result is an electronic record looking simultaneously backwards and forwards.
What’s the music like?
Packed with incident across an eventful three-quarters of an hour. There is so much going on here that repeated listening is essential to absorb and appreciate the sheer scale of the pair’s inventions.
At times their music sounds like an update of Anton Webern or John Cage, so compressed is its thinking, while the pair cast the net ever wider in search of extra instrumental colour. Humour abounds, with witty thoughts bubbling under the surface as the music ebbs and flows. Especially notable are Our Theme, which behaves like the tuning process of an analogue radio, the descriptive Gecko Lazzaro, featuring trombonist Patrick Crossland and guitarist Owen Gardner, and The Analysis of Joel, a playful and colourful shredding of lines from guitarist Joel Knispel.
3000 is typical of the warmth coursing through the album, its percussion suggesting African influences.
Does it all work?
Yes, in a way that makes you want to return often to Cloud Machines to see what else you can spot. There are so many musical happenings it can be difficult to keep up at first, but as the secrets reveal themselves so too does the pair’s full invention.
Is it recommended?
Yes, without a doubt – fans of the pair’s previous work will lap this up. Be assured, the music is every bit as colourful and as far out as the wonderful cover art!
Cultural historian, concert producer and author Joseph Horowitz issues his latest novel. On one level a prequel to The Marriage, The Disciple heads from the early 20th to the late 19th century and a New York as the New World emerges from the cultural dominance of the Old.
What’s the book like?
The book centres on Anton Seidl (1850-1898), Hungarian-born conductor whose association with Richard Wagner at Bayreuth during the latter’s final decade saw him progress from copyist, via stage-advisor, to conductor; in which capacity, he introduced the Ring tetralogy to Berlin and London. New York brought his greatest triumphs – first as conductor of German opera at the Metropolitan for six seasons then, after new management reasserted the supremacy of Italian opera, as music director of New York Philharmonic for seven seasons until his untimely death.
Against a backdrop of artistic success and public acclaim that reached adulatory heights in New York, Seidl evinced a persona on which that of Wagner left its indelible and unerasable stamp. His latter years were spent in frequent transit across the Atlantic, while he sought to further the Teutonic tradition through a Wagnerian aesthetic to which he was knowingly and ever more reluctantly in thrall. Yet he took a keen interest as to the evolution of an inherently American music, directing the world premiere of Dvořák’s New World Symphony and even following its precepts with an attempt at opera that his demise left unrealized. Unlike others among his peers, not least the unashamedly ambitious Walter Damrosch, an inward reserve mirrored his dislike of publicity at odds with the commercial dictates of American society.
It is in elucidating this gulf between personal achievement and self-knowledge that Horowitz is at his most enlightening. Already in the aftermath of Parsifal’s emergence is the realization that Wagner’s legacy was liable to atrophy given the mutual antagonisms of a family headed by the gaunt eminence of Cosima, for whom the dominance of Wagner over German culture outweighed all other considerations. Such thinking was uppermost in the minds of those who lauded Wagner as the saviour of high-art and Seidl as his representative on earth, though the latter himself saw this as a passing phase which, in the event, barely outlived his own demise. Little more than a quarter-century following his death, the triumphal premiere of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue underlined the seismic changes in American culture that had taken place.
Does it all work?
It does, and not necessarily as a fable of disillusion with regard to New York’s ‘Gilded Age’. Horowitz encompasses these cultural shifts with the assured sense of an era playing itself out in inevitable fashion; Seidel and his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic increasingly confronted by their own temporality. That those vaunted monuments to his memory failed to materialize appears hardly surprising, let alone shocking, is a tribute to the thoroughness with which Horowitz prepare his readers for this conductor’s and this era’s passing into obscurity.
Is it recommended?
It is. The Disciple should be read by all those for whom Wagner’s music and ‘thinking’ might earlier have been considered off-limits. Divided into numerous assimilable chapters, with an extensive glossary of relevant persons, it affords an engrossing and thought-provoking read.
It was likely coming after the ‘official’ end of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s season that brought a disappointingly low turnout for this concert, itself the culmination of the initial CBSO Orchestral Residency. This saw some five-dozen musicians, aged from 21 to 25, working alongside the orchestra’s musicians for an intensive week of rehearsals with Edward Gardner – principal guest conductor of the CBSO during 2010-16 and whose expertise across a broad range of repertoire was duly demonstrated by the ambitious programme heard tonight.
A first half devoted to Edgard Varèse ensured a testing workout for percussion in particular – 13 of them placed across the rear of the platform for the scintillating interplay of timbre and texture that is Ionisation; not the first such piece for the concert hall, but certainly the first of consequence. A pity that remarks by the conductor and Residency musicians did not precede rather than follow it, allowing the climactic entry of tuned instruments (chimes, glockenspiel and piano) to fade into the solo flute as commences Amériques with spellbinding immediacy.
Long notorious in terms of scale and impact, the latter work has now become something of a showpiece as this builds from post-impressionist musing, via passages alternately speculative and strident, to an apotheosis where jousting brass underpinned by a ‘walking bass’ uncannily anticipates symphonic jazz a generation hence. Under Gardner’s guidance, there was no risk of its losing focus – the players responding with discipline and no little relish to music as has lost none of that capacity to provoke and enthral just a century after its Philadelphia premiere.
The CBSO has an association with Harmonielehre stretching back more than 30 years to the recording (only the second) made with Simon Rattle. That this orchestra, with its Residency contingent, now brings greater freedom and flexibility says much about the development in orchestral playing over that time – along with the integration of John Adams’s work into the repertoire such that, far from being a polemic for reasserting the supremacy of ‘tonality’, it now yields all the attributes of a showpiece and may even be thought of as a crowd-pleaser.
Symphonic in aim if not necessarily intent, let alone attainment, this is music that can easily sprawl and it was to Gardner’s credit the un-titled first movement – with its alleged imagery of a super-tanker taking flight – maintained the impetus of those seismic opening chords, via music of expressive luxuriance, to a conclusion that fairly hit the ground running. Even finer was The Anfortas Wound, its brooding sombreness suffused with wrenching starkness on the way to a climax whose anguish references a comparable passage in Mahler 75 years on.
As with many symphonies actual or otherwise, the finale seems more a rounding-off than a resolution of the issues at stake, though there was no lack of purpose in Meister Eckhardt and Quackie as this imaginary encounter between a Medieval theologian and the composer’s infant daughter yielded unstoppable momentum prior to a headily affirmative close. Nor was there any doubting the conviction by which an expanded CBSO brought this work, and with it the whole concert, to its impressive conclusion. Roll on the Orchestral Residency for 2027.
The 2026 edition of the BBC Proms is underway! With a Transatlantic first night, the BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC Symphony Orchestra under Dalia Stasevska were joined by pianist Yunchan Lim for a special performance of Ravel‘s Piano Concerto.
Flanking this were two pieces celebrating America’s 250th ‘birthday’, Copland‘s Fanfare for the Common Man and Gershwin‘s An American in Paris, while French-British composer Josephine Stephenson was the ideal choice to write a first night premiere, That the sunrise not leave us unmoved.
Wrapping up the night was a rare performance of Finzi‘s For St Cecilia, a choral work of typical mystery and elegance but one that deserved its rare moment in the sun. Choral and orchestral forces then gave an encore of the Oasis song Wonderwall, acknowledging the England team’s prowess in the World Cup. A red card for its choice, I’m afraid – and a shame to have Finzi’s contribution immediately overshadowed in this way. Wonderwall is a great song, but felt miscast here.
Enough of my griping, though – as we should acknowledge many people enjoyed the inclusion, and the night as a whole was a celebratory indication of what we can expect to indulge in over the next eight weeks. Truly something for everyone.
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