Brian Eno’s music falls into two categories: he has albums to his name with idiosyncratic songs, pop music but unusual, and he is considered the inventor of ‘ambient music’: slow, broad background music, but interesting enough. so that concentrated listening pays off.
On Saturday evening in the Tivoli Vredenburg in Utrecht he looked for the middle between the two, and he found that with the help of an orchestra (the Baltic Sea Philharmonic) that performed acoustic versions of computer effects. An unorthodox orchestra, with walking musicians without sheet music and an over-enthusiastic, attention-seeking conductor with grand gestures. He was full of Eno, and remarkably full of himself.
He formed a stark contrast to Eno himself, who stayed in the background and only came to the fore during the final applause. During the concert he stood behind his keyboard and electronics, somewhere halfway down the stage, even when he had the microphone in his hands. Sometimes his singing was supported by electronics, but sometimes not and at times he sounded “like shit” (Eno’s own words), which was due to a bad cold.
The emphasis was on relatively recent material. The performance started with a complete performance of the album The Ship (2016), in an arrangement made especially for this orchestra. A beautifully exciting and accurately performed version, which sounded a lot more theatrical than the album.
This was followed by some shorter and older songs. ‘By The River’ in particular was received with great enthusiasm: although that song is fifty years old, he only now sang it live for the first time. The historic nature of this performance became palpable at that moment. But that wasn’t what Eno wanted to do: most of the songs were from a later date.
The current state of the world was also palpable – Eno did not want to ignore that. First he did that by ‘Bone Bomb‘ to play, a song from 2005 about a Palestinian girl who commits a suicide attack, and also about the doctor who has to operate on victims, he said. He had no role in the performance of the song (the vocals came from soprano Melanie Pappenheim), so he sat down “to cry.”
Before starting the encore, he addressed the situation in Gaza even more explicitly, with an angry denunciation of the unconditional and military support that the “underdeveloped British government has offered Israel.” We could listen to the songs ‘Making Gardens Out of Silence’ and ‘There Were Bells’ as a requiem for the dead in Gaza. Eno gave a historic performance, but he himself did not intend to close his eyes to world history.
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