As the big-budget classical marketing and manufacturing apparatus necessary to support the release of albums by the major symphony orchestras of Europe and the United States has shriveled, several of those orchestras have taken the natural step of issuing recordings of their own live performances. The idea is a good one, inasmuch as it promotes an immediacy of experience sometimes lacking in the music-making of venerable institutions like the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. That ensemble takes a new direction with its private-label releases in this first disc of what is apparently a new Horizon series: using the medium to promote new music. Three of the four pieces on this album were expressly written for the orchestra (although the reader does not learn whether it was specifically for this project). The idea is a good one and is worth exploration for other ensembles; it makes it possible for an orchestra to quickly respond to new trends and new composers. That doesn't consistently happen in this case. The music is of the sort that performers tend to enjoy more than audiences, with plenty to do for the percussion and brass sections and an orientation toward virtuoso writing within a largely atonal context. The number of mixed metaphors in the booklet notes is impressive. The most exciting work is the opening Number 9 VI: a bigger splash, by German composer
Moritz Eggert. The title refers to a painting by David Hockney. The stylistically kaleidoscopic quality of the music is relatable only in the most general way to that of the British painter, but it is entertaining to hear bits of jazz, pop, film music, and more fly by in a rush. Theo Verbeij's LIED for trombone and orchestra makes an intriguing attempt to catch the minimal accompaniment of an art song in a full-orchestra context. The album's greatest achievement may be the engineering. It's not clear whether what one hears is really a live concert or simply live in that way that almost any classical recording is live, but the level of sonic detail in the Super Audio sound (sampled on a good conventional stereo) is startling.