PIKTORS VERWANDLUNGEN

The third Album of this german prog band contains the honourable try to set famous poet Hermann Hesse 's fairy tale "Piktors Verwandlungen" into music. The result is a great 37 minute piece of symphonic music with views on Genesis, Camel and Pink Floyd, recorded entirely live with no overdubs, but a nice studio-like sound. The band resisted the temptation to tranform classic literature into song lyrics, and decided to narrate the story, accompanied by keyboards and guitar, between the instumental parts. This may disturb those who don 't speak German, but in my opinion it is, for this specific concept, the best approach. For better understanding how the music goes with the tale, I 'll summarize the story besides reviewing the music.

The work starts with a nice symphonic intro, featuring the main theme and fine synth and guitar parts. Then, in the 1st story-part, the narrator, bass player H. Bareth, tells of Piktor coming to paradise, finding a fantastic colourful world of change and transformation. It 's a place, where trees are man and woman, sun and moon, and a bird changing to a flower before his eyes leaves him overwhelmed. The band takes over with "Purpur", a fast, rocking piece with a good guitar solo, sounding a bit "krautish" (not in a negative sense), before it leads into the main theme again.

In the 2nd story-part Piktor encounters more metamorphosis, watches a flower becoming a butterfly becoming a red crystal, the source of transformation. As the stone starts to disappear, Piktor grabs it. A snake is urging him to quickly make a decision what he wants to be. Piktor chooses a tree.

"Der Baum" is a strong piece with a jazzy groove and several solos from organ, guitar and synth. Nice accents in the middle section. The 3rd story-part: Piktor, being a tree now, feels unhappy because he stands all alone, having lost the gift of transformation. While around him life is blooming and changing, he gets sadder and older. "Sehnsucht" is a slow piece with clean guitar, keyboards, spheric sounds, reminding of Floyd and Camel. Matches the title (Desire) beautifully.

In the 4th and 5th story-part (devided only by a short, spacey instrumental) a young girl appears and, watching her, the Piktor-tree falls in love and remembers being human, full of life. The girl leans to the tree and feels Piktor shivering, when a bird flies by and drops another crystal. By its power, the girl unites with the tree, becoming a bough, bringing new life, growth and change to Piktor. Now together as one, like a double-star, their life in paradise is fulfilled. "Doppelstern", the closing title, has german vocals and lyrics by H. Bareth and tries to be a bombastic finale, but for me is a weaker moment of the work, though played very well.

All in all a very good, unusual prog concept-album, that could stand, IMHO, a bit more composition and less soloing, but as a concert performance it is working really well.