Ballett 1

Album review

Ballett 1 is the first of four works to have been composed and recorded by Klaus Schulze after the passing of his mother in 1998. It and the other three volumes in the series were included on the now deleted ten-disc Contemporary Works I box set. It is one of those pieces in which Schulze moves dangerously close to classical music. He's flirted with it before with various qualitative results. There are three pieces -- or movements if you like -- that make up this nearly 77-minute work. Schulze manages all the keyboards, naturally, from sequencers and samplers to multi-chordal synths. Indeed, as the work begins with its use of sampled voices spouting gibberish, one thinks immediately of Jean Michel Jarre's classic Zoolook, but no dice; they pass very quickly and the endless chord patterns begin, accompanied by Wolfgang Tiepold's cello. The entire section (entitled "Getting Near") sounds like an intro whose passages fold in on themselves in order to begin the cycle anew. This is followed by the dramatic shift of "Slightly Touched," which lasts just under half an hour. There is a dynamic shift here as Tiepold's cello becomes the main focus of its beginning, with Schulze playing quietly and purposefully underneath, creating timbres and sonorities for the cellist to work from. The sequencer enters very cautiously at around the four-and-a-half-minute mark and begins to raise the work's tension bar. Tiepold continues his doleful and utterly beautiful playing without being forced to change anything. In fact, he weaves lines around the sequencers and the drum loops; he shimmers around in the middle register of his instrument and literally improvises. It's striking and imaginative. Meanwhile, Schulze stays in hypnosis mode, keeping everything in a taut line around the middle temporally and tonally until it gradually fades. Tiepold introduces "Agony," the third and final part of this monolithic work. He received a co-writing credit for this piece because, simply put, he makes it happen. His soloing comes from the Russian tradition and one can hear the moving drama derived from the Miserere of the Orthodox Church in his playing. Schulze lays back, playing only single chords during the first ten minutes or so. This is a sorrowful song, as Tiepold digs deeply into the cello's very wood for an expression of spiritual grief and human loss. Schulze's chords resemble a female chorus singing single notes behind him. It is dramatic, moving, and stunningly beautiful. Schulze literally stays "out" of the work and allows Tiepold to solo for the entire half-hour the piece lasts. This work is pretentious, but so are all of Schulze's recordings. It is imaginative in its way, and does employ "classical" themes without ever being, really, classical music. There is real emotion in this work, and it's boring in places only to be wonderfully, totally engaging in others -- particularly in "Agony."
© Thom Jurek /TiVo