| Contemporary music |
Geoffrey Gordon – Fumée: Painting in Sound, from de Kooning’s New York to the Cosmic and the Divine
Fumée, Geoffrey Gordon’s album on Neuma Records is a fifty-two-minute journey through three major orchestral works that transform paintings, poetry and philosophical ideas into some of the most vivid, exciting and deeply felt contemporary music you are likely to hear. Fumée is a genuinely exceptional album. The idea of translating visual arts into orchestral sounds is not new, yet Gordon executes it with such rigor and sensory immediacy that the approach feels novel, necessary, indispensable, and vital.
What makes Fumée immediately striking is its sheer ambition of scope. Three works, three different ensembles, three entirely different points of departure, Abstract Expressionism, Belle Époque song, Synchromist colour theory, and yet the album coheres completely, held together by Gordon’s unmistakable voice: restless, intellectually curious, sensuously alive to orchestral colour, and always, always in service of immediate emotional impact. This is music that thinks hard and feels harder. Yes, I repeat it: the approach feels novel, necessary, indispensable, and vital.
The album opens with Gotham News, Gordon’s response to Willem de Kooning’s explosive 1955 Abstract Expressionist painting of the same name, housed in Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Gallery. A critic once wrote of the canvas that “if it could talk, the work would yell”, and Gordon, who spent part of his youth in New York, took that observation as both challenge and invitation. The result, performed with gripping intensity by the Radom Chamber Orchestra under conductor Szymon Morus, is a string-orchestra work of remarkable psychological momentum and visceral force.
From its opening bars, Gotham News creates an atmosphere of propulsion and unease that never quite releases its grip. Dark lower-string surges collide with racing upper-register figures, abrupt silences are followed by sudden orchestral eruptions, hypnotic repeated motifs give way to jagged, almost percussive attacks. Gordon translates de Kooning’s “controlled chaos”, his newspaper transfers, his jarring colour contrasts, his simultaneous sense of destruction and vitality, into purely musical terms with astonishing fidelity. The piece does not illustrate the painting so much as inhabit its psychological state: urban, restless, fractured, alive.
Morus and the Radom Chamber Orchestra, recorded at the Krzysztof Penderecki Concert Hall in Poland, capture all of this with real authority. The ensemble plays with a precision that never tips into coldness, shaping Gordon’s volatile dynamics and abrupt textural shifts with complete conviction. At thirteen and a half minutes, Gotham News is a sustained act of orchestral storytelling that earns every second of its length, and announces, unmistakably, that the composer at the centre of this album is operating at a very high level indeed.
The album’s central pairing brings together Claude Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie in Gordon’s own arrangement, and the title work Fumée (smoke), a chamber concerto for clarinet and orchestra inspired not by Debussy directly, but by a contemporary of his: Reynaldo Hahn’s exquisite 1896 chanson of the same name, whose text drifts like smoke itself: “Companion of the ether, indolent smoke, I resemble you somewhat”.
Both works are performed by clarinettist Horácio Ferreira, praised by the Rheinische Post as a “sound wizard”, and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta under conductor Christoph Poppen, and the pairing is inspired. Gordon’s arrangement of the Debussy Première Rhapsodie is idiomatic and deeply sympathetic, emphasising the work’s fluid sensuality and impressionistic shimmer without imposing anything extraneous. Ferreira’s tone is warm, pliant and beautifully calibrated to the music’s shifting moods, playful and flirtatious one moment, searching and suspended the next. Poppen and the Sinfonietta provide an atmospheric backdrop of real refinement, allowing Debussy’s textures to breathe and glow without ever losing clarity or shape.
But it is Gordon’s own Fumée that reveals the full measure of his imagination. Built from the melodic and textual material of Hahn’s chanson, the concerto transforms the clarinet into something between a voice, a memory and a wisp of smoke, drifting, unpredictable, by turns lyrical and unsettled, elegant and strange. The work opens with delicate clarinet phrases floating above subtle orchestral writing, but Gordon quickly destabilises expectations: sudden changes of pace, darting high-register runs, abrupt pauses, almost vocal outbursts and moments of near-surreal whimsy keep the listener perpetually off-balance in the most pleasurable way.
What is most impressive is Gordon’s refusal to settle into a single emotional register. Beauty and anxiety coexist throughout; the music seems suspended between elegance and disorientation, never resolving into simple comfort. Ferreira’s performance here is nothing short of extraordinary, technically immaculate, dramatically fearless, and possessed of a tonal imagination that makes the clarinet sound like an instrument capable of almost anything. Poppen and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta match him every step of the way, their orchestral playing by turns tender, turbulent and luminously atmospheric. The Debussy and the Gordon together make an ideal programme, complementary without being redundant, each illuminating the other.
The album’s final and most ambitious work is Creavit Deus Hominem, a four-movement oboe concerto commissioned by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony for principal oboist José Luis García Vegara. Its conceptual inspiration is Synchromism, the early twentieth-century American movement pioneered by Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, which treated colour as music, canvases that pulse in rhythmic, almost orchestral counterpoint. Gordon takes that idea and pushes it toward something almost metaphysical, tracing a trajectory from intimacy to boundlessness across four movements whose titles alone, Still Life, Cosmic, Study after Michelangelo’s Pietà, Creavit Deus Hominem, suggest the scale of the journey.
Still Life opens in a state of introspective solitude, Vegara’s oboe unfolding long lyrical lines against subtly shifting orchestral textures. Gordon writes magnificently for the instrument, allowing it to move through a vast expressive range, from mournful to soaring, from vulnerable to playful, and Vegara responds with playing of extraordinary sensitivity and tonal beauty. The orchestra functions here not merely as accompaniment but as an extension of the oboe’s inner landscape, surrounding it with luminous harmonies, darting countermelodies and waves of gathering tension.
Cosmic expands the canvas dramatically, balancing ominous orchestral gestures against the oboe’s more exploratory lines in a movement that blends darkness and wonder with fascinating volatility.
Study after Michelangelo’s Pietà is perhaps the concerto’s most intimate and quietly devastating moment with long, expressive oboe lines paired with capricious orchestral commentary that shifts between tenderness and a kind of gentle unpredictability, evoking the emotional complexity of Michelangelo’s sculpture without ever illustrating it literally.
The title movement, Creavit Deus Hominem, brings everything to a powerful and genuinely stirring conclusion. Opening with booming percussion and an almost ritualistic intensity, the music builds toward something primal and elemental, the oboe becoming increasingly raw and untamed, at times resembling an animal cry emerging from deep within the orchestra’s brooding textures, before ascending into lighter, more luminous flights. Conductor Duncan Ward shapes the Frankfurt Radio Symphony’s performance with real architectural intelligence, managing the movement’s enormous dramatic arc with both precision and expressive freedom. The conclusion, explosive, rhythmically forceful, and deliberately unresolved, feels entirely right: this is music about creation and human turbulence, not comfortable closure.
Now, it would be a mistake to finish Fumée’s review without acknowledging the exceptional quality of the performances throughout. Fantastic ensembles, fantastic conductors, fantastic soloists, and not a weak link among them. Szymon Morus draws playing of real intensity and dramatic commitment from the Radom Chamber Orchestra. Christoph Poppen and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta bring elegance, colour and rhythmic precision to the Debussy and Gordon pairing. Duncan Ward conducts the Frankfurt Radio Symphony with authority and genuine interpretive intelligence. Horácio Ferreira and José Luis García Vegara are both soloists of the highest order, technically exceptional, dramatically engaged, and wholly convincing as advocates for music that makes real demands on its performers. All of them, without exception, deserve not only congratulations but a standing ovation.
Fumée is a landmark release, not just for Geoffrey Gordon, but for contemporary music more broadly. Intellectually rich, emotionally immediate, and performed throughout at the highest level, Fumée is one of the essential contemporary music albums of the year. Unreservedly recommended. A must have!
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, July 31st, 2026
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Tracklisting:
1 Gotham News 13:38
Radom Chamber Orchestra, cond. Szymon Morus
2 Première Rhapsodie 8:08
Claude Debussy, arr. Geoffrey Gordon
Hong Kong Sinfonietta, cond. Christoph Poppen
Horácio Ferreira, Bb clarinet
3 Fumée 10:36
(after the chanson by Reynaldo Hahn)
Hong Kong Sinfonietta, cond. Christoph Poppen
Horácio Ferreira, Bb clarinet
Creavit Deus Hominem
4 I. Still Life 6:01
5 II. Cosmic 3:23
6 III. Study after Michelangelo’s Pietà 3:51
7 IV. “Creavit Deus Hominem” (So God Created Man) 6:43
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, cond. Duncan Ward
José Luis García Vegara, oboe