GORMENGHAST

Gormenghast is an opera that was commissioned by the Wuppertaler Bühnen, and premiered at Opera House Wuppertal in 1998. The music was composed by Irmin Schmidt, the libretto was written by Duncan Fallowell. A lot of information is on the opera's website gormenghastopera.com, where we can also read that it combines "romance, comedy and futurism into an adventure of epic strangeness peopled by unforgettable characters." As I am fairly exclusively interested in the music and not so much in the story (which is not necessarily the story's fault), I won't comment more on that.

Ex-Can keyboarder Irmin Schmidt is a studied conductor and composer, and I'm actually surprised that this is the only work of this kind he did. This one combines classically composed orchestra parts and opera singing with modern elements. Apart from conducting the orchestra, Irmin himself her mainly shows his electronic side. There is hardly any piano, but some of the sound harks back to his electronic Toy Planet album. Electronic percussion, informed by the sampling technology of the day, also is a strong element here. There are contributions of Can's Jaki Liebezeit and Michael Karoli, but it's not much, and even hard to pin down. It's really vocals, electronics, and orchestra in the first place. Whereas I like the creativity of the rhythm programming, it comes over as a bit robotic (it features about half of the run time), and I wouldn't have complained about more Jaki, but here we go. There are some hints at the use of electronic rhythms in his following works with Kumo.

You may think about opera style singing whatever you want, but I think the combination with Irmin's electronic sounds works quite well here. Irmin certainly knows what he is doing, and he is in a rather unique position to come up with something like a "rock and classic synthesis", which has of course also been tried out by other prog musicians, and is something that some prog listeners appreciate well. The composition level here is high and goes well beyond the 19th century aesthetic that characterises some such work. Also Irmin can put together a well working melody, and does this, let's say, occasionally also here.

This album is no exception from Irmin's tendency to cite himself; the 1991 Impossible Holidays album had as closing track already something like a pre-overture to this one, and there is the Toy Planet connection, but by and large this is a unique work not only in his catalogue. It is hard to rate this for a prog rock site. As an opera with quickly changing themes it is for sure not easy listening, and it would be interesting to have an opera buff's opinion on this, but I will say that I'm satisfied enough with it for four stars, and I can imagine quite a number of prog fans open for this kind of experiment who will appreciate this.