Heiner Goebbels, David Bennent, Georg Nigl, Ensemble Modern, Deutscher Kammerchor, Franck Ollu

Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten (Landscape with Distant Relatives) is the first stage work that Heiner Goebbels called an opera, and this CD is its recorded counterpart. Commissioned by the Grand Théâtre de Genève and premiered in Geneva in October 2002, it has no linear plot. Instead it assembles texts from several centuries around war, history and the uneasy relation between art and reality. Goebbels sets them in a music that moves freely from Renaissance pastiche to Bollywood and country.

The recording was made live in October 2004 at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, during the Festival d'Automne in Paris, as a co-production of ECM, Ensemble Modern and SWR Baden-Baden. Franck Ollu conducts the Ensemble Modern and the Deutscher Kammerchor, whose sixteen singers also take solo lines. The baritone Georg Nigl and the actor David Bennent share the leading roles as equals, one singing and one speaking. Max Federhofer was the Tonmeister and mixed the album with the composer, and Manfred Eicher was executive producer.

The texts come from Gertrude Stein, Giordano Bruno, Henri Michaux, T. S. Eliot, Leonardo da Vinci and Nicolas Poussin. The work falls into two parts that begin with the same introduction, the second time with speech added. Three large pieces anchor the first part: Tanz der Derwische, Eliot's Triumphal March with its obsessive lists and figures, and Schlachtenbeschreibung. In this setting of Leonardo's description of a battle, Nigl sings over an agitated ensemble. The second part turns to cities, journeys and radio. It takes in a Hindi film song by A. R. Rahman and the cowboy song Out Where the West Begins, and ends with Poussin's Principes as a slow drone.

In The Guardian in December 2007, Andrew Clements noted that the disc cannot carry the visual side of the staging, but found it "totally absorbing" even as a soundtrack. Le Monde de la musique gave the album its Choc du mois. Rob Cowan, in The Independent, described a score that runs from early instruments to "teeth-baring aggression", including "an army of drummers raising merry hell." The players of the Ensemble Modern switch between a wide array of instruments, from harpsichord, musette and Chinese bamboo flute to sampler and bass guitar.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1811, first released in 2007.