Gramophone reviews Fumée....

Geoffrey Gordon’s triptych of orchestral works – each sparked by a visual image – makes for a fascinatingly cohesive release. These are, to borrow a useful frame, atmospheric film scores to movies that never happened. That they work so compellingly as pure concert music is a measure of Gordon’s imagination.

The album opens with Gotham News, Gordon’s response to Willem de Kooning’s 1955 canvas. ‘If it could talk, the work would yell’, a critic wrote of the painting – and one could easily say the same of Gordon’s score. The Radom Chamber Orchestra attack its controlled chaos with conviction, the last three minutes constituting a coda that brilliantly brings the disparate parts together, ending with a few growls and a grunt.

Gordon’s arrangement of Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie and the title concerto Fumée were conceived as a pair – premiered together on September 14, 2023, by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in Örebro, Debussy first, Fumée to follow. Gordon actually found his way in not through Debussy but through Reynaldo Hahn’s ravishing 1896 chanson, its text – ‘Companion of the ether, indolent smoke, I resemble you somewhat’ – providing both musical material and spiritual compass. Clarinettist Horácio Ferreira is at home with the largeness and fineness of spirit both works demand, and the Debussy arrangement shares the same moments of pure beauty, the same transcendence.

Creavit Deus Hominem is effectively an oboe concerto, its four movements tracing a trajectory from intimacy to boundlessness with José Luís García Vegara as the constant human voice amid Gordon’s vast orchestral forces; the composer’s ability to play with layers of light and harmony, realising an organic continuity in the mass of sound, is remarkable. It ends as triumphantly as an oboe and such a conglomeration can.

The booklet’s reproductions of the visual images that inspired each work are indispensable.