Rating:
Genre:
New Age
Release Date: 06/02/2008
Run Time: 72:14
Wim Mertens' first album after dropping the group name
Soft Verdict, the double-disc
Maximizing the Audience consists of the music for
Jan Fabre's play
The Power of Theatrical Madness, which premiered in Venice, Italy, on June 11, 1984. This is
Mertens' first foray into extended compositional forms; the pieces on earlier
Soft Verdict records had been between two and nine minutes in length, but aside from the four-and-a-half-minute
"The Fosse" and the 12-minute title track, all the pieces on
Maximizing the Audience are close to 20 minutes long. Either the length or the music's function as a theatrical background makes these five pieces some of the most traditionally
minimalist music of
Mertens' career. For example,
"Circles," featuring a single soprano saxophone over a bed of overdubbed interlocking clarinets, is pure
process music in the tradition of early
Steve Reich.
"Whisper Me" is similar in compositional style, but its more traditional
chamber music orchestration -- cello, viola, French horn, and piano -- gives the piece an entirely different texture.
Mertens reaches back to earlier
Soft Verdict compositions on
Maximizing the Audience.
"Lir," which like
"The Fosse" takes its name from one of
Ezra Pound's
Cantos, is a piece for two pianos that incorporates the 1982 composition
"Gentleman of Leisure" for one of its sections. Similarly, the title track quotes extensively from 1983's
"Inergys." The results sound less like self-plagiarism than evidence of a desire to revisit earlier work with the added compositional complexity evinced throughout
Maximizing the Audience.
~Stewart Mason, All Music Guide
;)
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