Music Arcades: Michael Nyman: Live

I'd forgotten I had this. It's another of those I bought (for a fiver from Fopp) during my great gorge of 2001-2, when I was buying CDs faster than I could listen to them. Anyway, I'm glad I have it, because it's rather fine.

There should be more recordings of Michael Nyman Band live. Looking through my old cassettes, I find have an off-air recording of them in 1993, a year before this CD was made, and also my inexpertly recorded bootleg of the one time I saw them myself. As referred to before, this was at the Royal Northern College of Music on 22 January 1988 (I still have the ticket: £4 for seat E10). Alexander Balanescu was still in the band then. Despite the very poor quality, it's still possible to enjoy the vibrant and energetic performance. I'm listening to the bootleg as I type: this band could rock. As David Toop notes in the sleeve notes,

A preference for emotional impact over correctness or intellectual complexity has been present at every stage of [Nyman's] convoluted career. In Romania, he recorded a brass band which performed with great passion but many mistakes. "I was really excited by this," he says. "I went back to the Folklore Institute in Bucharest and played this tape to one of the regular folklorists there. He didn't react, then he said, "This music is really bad. We don't want this kind of thing."

I'm less keen on the second 'half' of the CD which is a 'concert suite' of Nyman's score for The Piano — the music was never a favourite of mine as it misses the Nyman Band trademark driving rhythms. In the middle there's a specially commissioned piece, part of Expo '92 in Seville, where Nyman writes for and performs with Moroccan musicians. I'm not sure about that yet. The music is good, but the performance lacks the feel of a band who've been breathing the same air for months and years.