There is a level of expectation with a piece of work like Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre) that threatens to color the experience of listening to it. It's a reminder that what we bring to a piece of music shapes how we listen. In the crudest of terms, it's an album adapted from a score for a piece of theatre based on novel responding to a historical event. More specifically, it is the work of Berlin-based producer Apparat, commissioned by German theatre director Sebastian Hartmann for his 2012 production of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. While these cold facts could perhaps appear impenetrable on paper, Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre) is a delightful challenge to both fixity and expectations.
There are many layers of response at work here and, similarly, as many reflections and echoes between the various responses. It was the result of intense collaboration between Hartmann and his cast, Apparat’s Sascha Ring and the musicians he involved, and with the ever-shifting nature of the production itself during the making and staging of it with the score performed live by an orchestra each night. That inherent sense of flux permeates every note on the album; it surprises at every turn. The delicate music box chimes of “K&F Thema” seem to come from nowhere, like sparks of vibrant light shooting up from the stark, watery landscape of the preceding “Blank Page”. Swelling strings proceed to engulf the chimes until they themselves are cut short, succumbing to distant drums sending out a warning. “K&F Thema (Pizzicato)” is, as the title indicates, a plucked variation on the main theme, conveying a level of affected yet affecting sophistication. The desire to join the dots in the bigger narrative is strong: is this the aristocracy’s last dance before the war fractures their insular way of life?
Swimming beneath Ring’s orchestral arrangements is a primordial soup of sonics: the falling of rain outside a window, the awkward tumble of unknown objects, a shrill whirl of drills. The hustle and bustle of these sounds ground the grandiose orchestration in the real world, give it an abstract sense of the mud and blood-splattered physicality of war. Ring’s skill here recalls the work of cult techno producer Torsten Pröfrock, a man he has previously paid tribute to for instilling in him “the idea of sounds having a patina [...] That sounds really needs something like that-- a little dirt is always important in your music.” There are also lines to be drawn with the work of cellist Julia Kent who incorporates found sound into her recordings. On an even wider level, it speaks to the many conversations going on in contemporary composition today: briefly, about whether to embrace electronic means, as Anna Meredith has done, or uphold tradition in composing solely for orchestra.
Ring has, of course, come to the orchestra from the other side of the fence. It was his last album The Devil’s Walk that first found him breaking with his techno production past to more fully incorporate instrumentation and his own singing voice. While there's a touch of mid-90s, prog-rock musical theatre to the two vocal tracks on Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre)-- “Light On” and “A Violent Sky”-- it's not unwelcome. Ring’s orchestral and electronic score communicates the narrative’s swing from complacent luxury to riveting despair, showing what happens when worlds collide.
