GEOFFREY GORDON, Fumée

For some composers, visual art serves merely as inspiration, but in the musical imagination of Geoffrey Gordon, it becomes architecture — a way of shaping motion, color, emotional tension and sonic space into something almost tactile. Across Fumée, the latest release from Neuma Records, the British-American composer transforms paintings, poetry and philosophical ideas into vividly cinematic orchestral environments that feel less like conventional concert works than all-encompassing sensory experiences. Performed by an international roster of elite ensembles, conductors and soloists, the album reveals Gordon as a composer uniquely attuned to the psychological and physical properties of sound itself.

What unites the three major works presented here is Gordon’s fascination with translation: color into orchestration, brushstroke into rhythm, poetic atmosphere into melodic contour. Yet despite the conceptual sophistication behind the music, Fumée never feels academic or remote. These are deeply visceral compositions, alive with dramatic movement, restless volatility and striking textural imagination.

The album opens with “Gotham News”, a turbulent and often electrifying response to Willem de Kooning’s explosive 1955 Abstract Expressionist painting of the same name. Gordon, who spent part of his youth in New York, channels the canvas’ jagged urban chaos into a string-orchestra work of enormous psychological momentum. Performed with gripping intensity by the Radom Chamber Orchestra under conductor Szymon Morus, the piece unfolds as a constantly shifting landscape of tension and release.

From its opening moments, “Gotham News” establishes an atmosphere of unease and propulsion. Dark lower-string surges collide with racing upper-register figures, while abrupt pauses and sudden bursts of orchestral force create the sensation of navigating a city in perpetual motion. Gordon’s writing frequently alternates between ominous cello-heavy passages and lighter, almost airborne violin textures, creating a restless push-and-pull between darkness and illumination. At times the music feels hypnotic, driven by repeated motifs and swirling rhythmic figures; elsewhere it erupts into jagged percussive attacks and emotionally charged orchestral swells. Even in quieter passages, tension lingers beneath the surface. Morus and the orchestra capture the work’s volatility brilliantly, shaping its chaotic energy into something both unsettling and exhilarating.

If “Gotham News” explores urban intensity through abstraction, the album’s central pairing — Claude Debussy’s “Première Rhapsodie” and Gordon’s own “Fumée” — moves into more elusive, dreamlike territory. Gordon’s arrangement of the Debussy classic, performed by the Hong Kong Sinfonietta under Christoph Poppen with clarinetist Horácio Ferreira, emphasizes the work’s fluid sensuality and playful elegance. Ferreira leads with a warm, expressive tone that glides effortlessly between lyrical introspection and dazzling virtuosity. The clarinet dances gracefully through Debussy’s shifting orchestral colors, sometimes whimsical and flirtatious, elsewhere more searching and hauntingly suspended. Poppen and the orchestra provide an understated but richly atmospheric backdrop, allowing the piece’s impressionistic textures to shimmer without losing clarity.

That atmosphere deepens considerably in Gordon’s title work, “Fumée”, inspired not directly by Debussy but by Reynaldo Hahn’s haunting Belle Époque chanson of the same name. Built from melodic and textual fragments of Hahn’s song, Gordon’s concerto transforms the clarinet into an unpredictable narrative voice drifting through constantly shifting turbulent terrain. Ferreira’s performance here is extraordinary — by turns lyrical, eccentric, playful, anxious and almost surreal.

The work opens gently, with delicate clarinet phrases floating above subtle orchestral textures, but Gordon quickly destabilizes expectations. Sudden changes in pacing, darting high-register runs, abrupt pauses and sharply punctuated orchestral gestures create an atmosphere that feels simultaneously dreamlike and unsettled. At moments the clarinet seems to wander freely through a haze of memory and smoke; elsewhere it erupts into flurries of virtuosic motion or strange, almost vocal-like outbursts. The orchestral writing remains intentionally fluid and elusive, alternately offering tender harmonic support and bursts of darker tension. What makes the piece so compelling is Gordon’s refusal to settle into a single mood or temperament. Beauty and anxiety coexist constantly, creating a work that feels suspended between elegance and disorientation.

The album concludes with Creavit Deus Hominem, a four-movement oboe concerto inspired by Synchromism, the early twentieth-century artistic movement that sought to treat color as music. Here Gordon expands his fascination with orchestral color into something almost metaphysical. Performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony under Duncan Ward with principal oboist José Luis García Vegara, the concerto becomes an exploration of sound as radiant, shifting matter.

The opening movement, “Still Life,” introduces Vegara’s oboe in a state of introspective solitude, its lyrical phrases unfolding against subtly evolving orchestral textures. Gordon writes magnificently for the instrument, allowing the oboe to move through an astonishing expressive range — mournful one moment, playful and soaring the next. The orchestra responds not simply as accompaniment but as an extension of the oboe’s psychological landscape, surrounding the soloist with darting figures, luminous harmonies and waves of mounting tension.

“Cosmic” intensifies this dynamic, balancing ominous orchestral gestures against the oboe’s more lyrical and exploratory lines. Gordon creates a fascinating blend of darkness and wonder here, with tense strings and sudden orchestral jabs offset by moments of hypnotic calm. The third movement, “Study after Michelangelo’s Pietà,” becomes more intimate and vulnerable, pairing long, expressive oboe lines with capricious orchestral commentary that alternates between tenderness and unpredictability.

The title movement brings the concerto to a powerful conclusion. Opening with booming percussion and almost ritualistic intensity, the music evokes something primal and elemental. Vegara’s oboe becomes increasingly untamed, at times resembling an animal cry emerging from within the orchestra’s brooding textures before ascending into lighter, more angelic flights. Ward and the Frankfurt players shape the movement’s dramatic architecture masterfully, building toward a conclusion filled with explosive rhythmic force and unresolved human turbulence.

Throughout Fumée, Gordon demonstrates a rare ability to merge intellectual ambition with immediate sensory impact. His music is undeniably sophisticated, drawing from visual art, literature, philosophy and orchestral tradition, yet it never loses its visceral immediacy. Whether evoking the fractured energy of de Kooning’s New York, the drifting melancholy of Belle Époque poetry or the radiant abstraction of Synchromist painting, Gordon composes with a striking command of atmosphere, movement and orchestral color.

Just as importantly, the performances throughout the album are exceptional. Ferreira, Vegara, Poppen, Ward, Morus and the participating orchestras approach this demanding music not as academic exercises but as living dramatic experiences filled with tension, mystery and expressive possibility.

By the album’s conclusion, Fumée feels less like a collection of contemporary orchestral works than an extended meditation on transformation itself — the transformation of image into sound, emotion into texture, and abstraction into something profoundly human.