Klaus Schulze & Lisa Gerrard - Rheingold

3.5

Release data:

Klaus Schulze & Lisa Gerrard – Rheingold
DVD, Synthetic Symphony/SPV, 2008

After their surprising strong album “Farscape”, Klaus Schulze and Lisa Gerrard did a live concert on July 18th, 2008 at the “Night of the Prog III” on the open air stage “Loreley” in St. Goarshause, Germany.

The double-dvd “Rheingold” contains the full concert on the first disc in both 5.1 Dolby Surround and 2.0 Stereo, while the second dvd is commited to the documentary “The real world of Klaus Schulze”. The latter e.g. gives a nice insight in how Lisa and Klaus met, how the two worked on the “Farscape” album, and most of all how Klaus and Tom Dams afterwards worked with others in the grand Real World studio on the surround mix for the live-dvd.
In addition, the second dvd features an interview Steven Wilson (from Porcupine Tree) did with Klaus Schulze. During the live concert, the expressive, vibrant, soft mourning voice of Lisa Gerrard graces two tracks, the 39-minute “Loreley” and the 14-minute “Wellgunde”.

After shortly announcement by a fragile looking Klaus Schulze, the concert starts with the almost 25-minute “Alberich”. Synth twitters lead into improvised, heavenly sounding vocal pads, peacefull yet expressive. After 10 minutes or so, a slow sequence shows up in the background,, which puts the piece in motion before Schulze briefly turns to his Mini Moog to extract rather harsh soundings from it. The first part of this track sure has my preference.

For the almost 40-minute “Loreley”, Lisa joins Klaus on stage. After a lyrical start of flowing textural paintings, Lisa adds her powerful, mourning but wordless vocals. Sequencer and percussive patterns that realmed in the background are pushed to the foreground in the second part, as Klaus enthusiatically starts adding abstract, distracting and annoying sounds, fortunately only for a few minutes, after which Lisa’s takes over, turning the piece in a more enjoyable direction.
Another misplaced improvisation on Mini Moog follows before Klaus rounds out the track. A quiet passage of the two musicians follows, which is much more pleasant, as non-rhythmic synth pads with symphonioc hints nicely compliment Lisa’s sedate voice magic, venturing in ethereal, heavenly territory. This is very well done indeed.

“Wotan” is next, a Schulze solo piece.It’s a rather static sequencer/percussive dominated outing with rather freaky solo playing on the Mini Moog before things are winded down in an awfull experimental ending.

For me, the 15-minute “Wellgunde” is the stunning highlight on this release. Lisa starts out solo, Klaus steps in after a few minutes. This is a harmonious, simple but very effective improvisation with no missteps, beautifully showing one musician complementing (but also leaving space for) the other, with a nice “thunder” ending.

The encore is the 11-minute “Nothung”, for which Klaus pulls out another bunch of sequences and percussion to which he adds lush, but minimal sounding and not that interesting improvisation. The variation here solely comes from the percussion.

Although it’s nice to see Klaus and Lisa live on stage, I miss the a certain amount of quality, intimacy and dreamy impact which was captured so nicely on “Farscape”.
Next to this double-dvd, “Rheingold” is available as 2-dvd + 2-cd limited edition digipak, and double cd (of which the latter contains the 31-minute bonustrack “Nibelungen”, which is not featured on the dvd-release).

Website: www.spv.de

You can see what reviews I have done of these artists on the Klaus Schulze, Lisa Gerrard artist pages