First performed last year, Heiner Goebbels’s “phonographic collection from my imaginary notebook” is his first major orchestral work since the suite Surrogate Cities in 1994. He describes it as a cycle of invocations, prayers, poems and songs for a large orchestra, but, as always with Goebbels, it’s not as straightforward as that. The title comes from a line in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; in early 19th-century England, a “house of call” was a public space in which itinerant artisans could put their skills up for hire, and the 100-minute score creates a space in which recorded voices that Goebbels has sourced from wax cylinders, news reports and ethnographic sources can be given a political or historical context and a musical response.
