Mã¼nchner Merkur Vom 31. August 2010

The Vaselines broke up in 1989 just after the release of their only album, Dum Dum. The split was partly due to the members Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee splitting as a couple, partly down to not seeing a place for themselves in the music industry. Despite a brief reunion shortly after their demise to play a couple shows in support of Nirvana (Kurt Cobain was rather famously a huge fan of the band), the split seemed very final. Jump ahead almost 20 years to 1998 and a call from Sub Pop…

German composer York Höller's orchestral cycle Sphären, which won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in composition in 2010, receives its first recording in this performance with Semyon Bychkov leading WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln. It's an attractive, inventive piece of non-doctrinaire modernism with the appeal to reach fans of contemporary music. Höller's language tends to be dense, but it is colorful, if generally skewed to somber and subdued colors.