Springer is an artist associated with his dynamic piano playing but having started in the riotous collective punk/jazz/pop band, Rip Rig+Panic, he continues to work with multi-instrumentalist musicians to create works for strings, voice and naturally, the piano. More recently there have been operas - Army of Lovers (Exit018) with an all male voice ensemble and chamber orchestra, and in Matter (Exit019) a song cycle, pared down to a mezzo soprano voice, piano and the Tana Quartet. Now comes, Sleep of Reason, a virtuosic work in three major parts; solo piano, quartet and quintet of strings and vocal. The latter piece has the distinctive voice and lyrics of Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys) who brings a steely edge to the Sacconi Quartet’s expressive, encircling strings.
Springer composed the quintet music from an evocation of the artist, Francisco Goya’s series of etchings, Los Caprichos, a scathing and scratchy visual rendering of the corruption and hypocrisy of those in authority in 1790s Spain. Springer and Tennant translate these piercing pictures of intense light and dark into a series of 6 unsettlingly poignant songs that stroke and snap the listener with taut themes and the twisted images of our contemporary world.
The Sleep of Reason Quintet begins the album and ‘Phantoms and Monsters’, the opening track, sets us off into a narrative and musical map which feels deeply atmospheric with the Sacconi Quartet’s precise guidance. ‘Morn, Noon, Night’, the movements of the quartet piece follow and now the strings stand alone as one tight entity, the echo of the vocal hovering but no longer giving lyric form to the musical images. Finally the whole work is distilled into the solo line of the piano, with Springer drawing out earlier themes to reprise and disrupt recurring dreams.
Each section of the whole album is entitled “Sleep of Reason" and seems to be Springer’s reverie on the membrane of layers that exist between our conscious yearning for order and harmony while being pulled into waves of sound. The recurring motifs that interplay within all three pieces are never resolved in the traditional musical sense as that is not the nature of dreams, or of Springer the composer. Instead, he propels us into a sonic world that pulses forward then suspends timing and leaves us faltering in the dark - beautiful, eery, menacing and seducing. There is light and shade and true depth in this powerful music.
