12 August 2024, Richard Fairman, Financial Times
Review (en)

A hushed late-night performance of Heiner Goebbels

Barenboim has spoken about the quietness of Proms audiences. That is even more evident at the late-night Proms; the most recent had hushed concentration for Heiner Goebbels’s Songs of Wars I Have Seen (2002/07).

The work was commissioned for a mixed group of players drawn from the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and contemporary specialists the London Sinfonietta. Goebbels selected readings from Gertrude Stein’s memoir of living in occupied France during the second world war; his music does not so much interpret the texts as establish a pensive mood in which they can be pondered.

Stein’s quirky, everyday observations are what matter here, at least until a solo trumpet epilogue compels attention. Goebbels instructs that extracts be read by the female musicians, who did so very professionally at this performance, and they were well amplified. As at the premiere, the OAE and London Sinfonietta joined forces, this time conducted by Chloe Rooke

on: Songs of Wars I have seen (Music Theatre)