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German composer and music theatre innovator Heiner Goebbels'
Surrogate Cities is an exploration of the complexities of the city: "[I]t is an attempt to approach the phenomenon of the city from various sides, to tell stories of cities, expose oneself to them, observe them ... to try and read the city as a text". Incorporating musical flashbacks as well as literary works (with quotes from Paul Auster, Hugo Hamilton and Heiner Mller) the music is as multi-faceted as the nameless, ubiquitous, ancient and modern cities that it invokes.
The CD, which includes the marvellous, often Reichian, Suite for Sampler and Orchestra, The Horatian--Three Songs (concerning the war between Rome and Alba), was commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and the 1,200th anniversary of the city of Frankfurt, and it represents one of Goebbels' most accomplished and satisfying projects. Despite the music's concentration on the places people live and have lived, this is a moving, sometimes bombastic, often exciting document of people themselves, their memories and the lives they weave inside structures they only partially construct. --Mark Thwaite