Sven Helbig: I Eat The Sun And Drink The Rain – Kristjan Järvi

   in Choir & Organ (Mar, 2017)
Still best-known for his work with Pet Shop Boys, particularly their score for Battleship Potemkin in Trafalgar Square in 2004, Sven Helbig is a highly eclectic composer who mixes the avant-garde principles he pioneered as co-founder of the Dresden Symphony Orchestra with more accessible song forms. I Eat the Sun… is perhaps best heard as a tessellation of tone poems rather than the grand-scale music theatre he has explored elsewhere. It has poetic, rather than narrative, coherence, working to texts by Helbig himself, a traditional Kyrie text and a poem by Leopaldi. The singing is rich and resonant, perhaps a little overproduced in the rock music manner, but harmonically sophisticated …