Tim Ashley 

Surrogate Cities – review

Stockhammer exerted an iron control over the proceedings, so you could hear plenty of detail, even when the music was at its most violent, writes Tim Ashley
  
  


First performed in 1994, Heiner Goebbels' Surrogate Cities is a vast, unclassifiable piece that summons up the soundscape of an unnamed metropolis and forces us to confront our ideas of urban dreams and urban hell. Like much of Goebbels's music, it is at once radical and eclectic. Orchestral music and vocals blend with electronics. The running order of its disparate movements is ultimately the decision of its performers, but whichever way it is played, it reveals a powerful unity of vision. It engages in an on-going dialogue with the Austro-German musical tradition, incorporating elements of jazz and blues into a score that is Mahlerian in scale and scope and that glances more than once at the earlier cityscapes of Berg and Weill.

The piece was originally written for a youth orchestra, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, and the long overdue London premiere, part of the Music Nation weekend, was appropriately given by young musicians. Jonathan Stockhammer conducted the Trinity Laban Symphony Orchestra, augmented by members of the National Youth Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra's Foyle Future Firsts scheme.

Stockhammer exerted an iron control over the proceedings, so you could hear plenty of detail, even when the music was at its most violent. Paradoxically, it is when Goebbels relaxes the tensions, that you notice the occasional flaws, and in this instance, the central movement, Sampler Suite, felt over-long. David Moss and Jocelyn B Smith were the familiar soloists: his eerie sprechstimme is the perfect contrast to her bluesy utterances. The orchestra was the real star, however, playing with terrific enthusiasm. The percussionists in particular, whirling vertiginously on a gallery above the tiers of musicians below, deserved a medal.

 

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