Heiner Goebbels subtitles A House of Call “My imaginary notebook”. First performed in 2021, it was his first score for full orchestra in more than a quarter of a century and, at 105 minutes, it is one of his longest works to date. The starting point for its 15 movements, which are thematically grouped into four sections, was a scrupulously documented anthology of found recordings that Goebbels assembled over many years. The samples range from the early days of wax cylinders to the present, whether that’s the sounds of a Berlin building site or an Amazonian ritual, children singing a Bach chorale in the 1930s or the playwright Heiner Müller reading from his own works; all of them have been embedded in an orchestral score of extraordinary imagination.
The huge range of reference and allusion in A House of Call (the title comes from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake) came across vividly on the ECM recording that was released last year. But in a live performance such as this UK premiere, which was superbly prepared and presented by the London Philharmonic, conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni, the sheer subtlety and complexity of the orchestral writing seemed even more impressive.
