Frank Zappa:
The Dog Breath Variations - Uncle Meat
Dupree's Paradise
The Perfect Stranger
G-spot Tornado
Revised Music for Low Budget Orchestra
Heiner Goebbels:
Suite for Sampler and Orchestra from Surrogate Cities

Frank Zappa’s music crosses all boundaries and has fans in all musical camps. The recordings of Zappa’s own band are legendary, but with the release of “The Yellow Shark” featuring Ensemble Modern, a German chamber orchestra based in Frankfurt, Zappa’s music became standard repertoire for symphony orchestras or at least for those that dare to accept the challenge. This is intense and demanding music for an orchestra, but who is better equipped for the task than the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, celebrated for the diversity of its repertoire and collaborations? The orchestra is led by former Chief Conductor Thomas Sondergard (now Principal Conductor of BBC National Orchestra of Wales). The Danish maestro is known for taking contemporary music seriously and, yes, Zappa is contemporary music.

Heiner Goebbels is well-known and respected as dramatist, director, musician, and composer. He received the International Ibsen Award in 2012. “Suite for Sampler and Orchestra” is from his large work “Surrogate Cities”, a fable of the modern city. It draws inspiration from, among others, Baroque music, Jewish prayer chants, and industrial noise. In the composer’s words it is “an attempt to approach the phenomenon of the city from various sides, to tell stories of cities, expose oneself to them, observe them; it is material about metropolises that has accumulated over the course of time.”

The recording was made during a concert at Rockefeller Concert Hall in Oslo in February 2010.