Heiner Goebbels
Songs of Wars I Have Seen
London Sinfonietta
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Chloe Rooke
conductor
Reviewed by:
Reviewed: 9 August, 2024
Venue: Royal Albert Hall
In 2007 new-music ensemble the London Sinfonietta and period-instrument outfit the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment together gave the first performance of Heiner Goebbels’s Songs of Wars I Have Seen, commissioned by the Southbank Centre to mark the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall. Seventeen years later, the two orchestras are reunited under fast-rising conductor Chloe Rooke for a London revival of this landmark setting of wartime diary entries by Gertrude Stein, a work that manages to prove harrowing, poignant and consoling all at once, and whose visions of war have scarcely been more relevant.
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