Bowie on Strings

Interpreters

Ian Anderson . Arrangements
Stuttgarter Kammerorchester

Programme

David Bowie
“Heroes” (1977)
“Blackstar” (2016)

“We can be heroes, just for one day.” (David Bowie: title song from “Heroes”)

Ian Anderson, composer and violist of the radical string quintet ‘Wooden Elephant’, arranges “Heroes” and “Blackstar” for strings and a series of purely acoustic ‘instruments’ (in quotation marks...) for the SKO, thus creating a 21st-century monument to the hero David Bowie.

Bowie attaches great importance to the quotation marks in “Heroes”. Do real heroes even exist? He asks himself the same question. At the age of thirty, the most influential style icon of all rock artists has already lived at least seven lives on stage and looked into more psychedelic abysses than he would have liked. In 1977, he took a break from the scene in Los Angeles and found it in Berlin, of all places. The album ‘Heroes’ from the Berlin Trilogy was created in the Hansa Studio in the west of the city, not far from the Wall. Bowie brought some congenial fellow musicians on board. They improvised almost all of the songs as if in a flow and recorded them immediately. Critics speak of a stroke of genius, ‘Heroes’ becomes a classic in rock history and Bowie once again proves how art can bring people back to life. Or rather: creating art is his life. He is not afraid of dying.

David Bowie, the androgynous Brit with different-coloured eyes, is a tireless artist, musician, actor and producer. From the late 1960s until his death exactly 10 years ago, on 10 January 2016, he was constantly reinventing himself. With each new album (‘Hunky Dory’, ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Space Oddity’, ‘Let's Dance’, ‘Tonight’, ‘The Next Day’...) he reached for the stars and catapulted the entire art world from one galaxy to the next. He transcended all genre boundaries and didn't care about convention. With his own end already in sight, he released his 28th (!) album, Blackstar, as a kind of legacy. Just two days later, he died of liver cancer, which he had kept secret from the outside world, including his music partners during the recording. Death came faster than expected for him, as Bowie still had other projects in the pipeline at the time.

The title says it all. In astronomy, ‘Blackstar’ describes a dying star. The album is Bowie's artistic self-mystification without any vanity or bitterness, not a tearful farewell, but rather a ‘take-off’, a transformation from the mortal to the eternal through music. Art rock, avant-garde jazz and experimental sounds flow together in ‘Blackstar’ to create a once again novel, multi-layered and fascinatingly dazzling sound. And this Bowie album, too, is already a classic upon its release, making it a perfect template for a master of genre-crossing such as the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester!

Anne Sophie Meine