Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

The Financial Times NOVEMBER 1, 2023 - by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

BRIAN ENO AND BALTIC SEA PHILHARMONIC: BEAUTY AND CONSOLATION

The musician's London show featured shimmering soundscapes and his own reverberant voice

Brian Eno is no stranger to orchestras. Back when he was a young man making his way in music, he was a member of one: the Scratch Orchestra, an unorthodox ensemble run by the British experimental composer Cornelius Cardew. It's unclear whether he participated in one of its projects, an insurrectionary promenade concert intended to prise Richmond High Street from the vice-like grip of capitalism. But we can hear Eno among the voices on Cardew's composition Paragraph Seven, a semi-improvised choral piece recorded in 1971. It was Eno's first visit to a recording studio.

The elder statesman of electronic music was joined by a different orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in London this week. Commissioned by Venice's Biennale Musica, he has teamed with Baltic Sea Philharmonic for a live version of his 2016 album The Ship. This staging is his first solo outing in seven years. It finds him at the distinguished other end of his career. Eno is now 75, an "old man" suffering a severe cold, as he described himself at one point from the stage. A remark about a piece of music being almost fifty years ago old prompted a ruefully comic aside: "I wish I was!"

The first of two back-to-back evening shows opened with the multinational members of Baltic Sea Philharmonic filing into place in darkness while playing droning chords. The string, brass and woodwind players stood at the front, while a line of percussionists occupied a raised platform. The conductor Kristjan Järvi made gestures in the murky light and doubled, or tripled, as a musician and backing singer. The set-up was unorthodox - although not quite to the extent of Eno's avant-garde days.

He sat in the centre of the platform in a garish pink jacket, picked out by two spotlights as he began singing The Ship's title track, a 21-minute elegy to human progress through technology. "Illusion of control," Eno intoned in a deep singsong. His voice was low and reverberant, rolling slowly back and forth as though in the hull of a vast ocean-going vessel.

He used to subscribe to technological optimism, even utopianism, but no more. The Ship was inspired by that emblem of hubris, the Titanic, and also the industrial killing fields of the first world war. Rather than clichéd sounds of iceberg striking steel or crashing waves, the orchestra produced a shimmering, expansive soundscape, full of atmospheric deep-sea noises and a sense of the great beyond. The players were miked up. An excellent audio mix gave as much weight to the delicate plucking of a harp as it did the climactic barrage of brass and drums in Fickle Sun (i), a war-themed track.

The effects of Eno's cold were inaudible. He was flanked by regular collaborators Leo Abrahams, who played electric guitar, and computer musician Peter Chilvers. Soprano Melanie Pappenheim and actor Peter Serafinowicz provided additional vocals. The Ship's tracks ended with a cover of a Velvet Underground song, Fickle Sun (iii) I'm Set Free, which had a synthetically lush gospel feel, deliberately close to kitsch. "I'm set free to find a new illusion," Eno chanted as the stage became redemptively lit up.

A trip further back in time followed with the lullaby-like By This River, from his 1977 album Before And After Science. Then came tracks from his latest solo release Foreverandevernomore, which shared the same handsomely mournful feel as The Ship. Making Gardens Out Of Silence was repurposed as a lament for the current Israel-Hamas war.

"If you aren't demonstrating about this, you probably should be," Eno said before playing the song, as though the real action lay outside the auditorium. He has always believed in music as a force for change, but the certainties of the old days are gone. They've been replaced by a beautiful air of resignation and the desire for consolation, both of which were impressively orchestrated at the Festival Hall. The standing ovation he was awarded at the end would have horrified his former Scratch Orchestra comrades as pure bourgeois individualism, but it was deserved.