Tangerine Dream – 50 Years of Phaedra: At The Barbican Review
Tangerine Dream’s 50 Years of Phaedra: At The Barbican – a live album that captures their performance of the group’s landmark album on its 50th anniversary – is now available.
Phaedra, originally released in 1974, is considered by many to be Tangerine Dream’s most important album. It features what some consider to be the group’s classic lineup – Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann – and the music ranges from pastoral Mellotron flute soundscapes to driving sequenced space rock.
Half a century later, Tangerine Dream’s modern trio – Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick – performed the landmark album at London’s Barbican, reimagining it for a new era.
There are two main parts to the performance. The first half celebrates the 50th anniversary of Phaedra, by featuring a live performance of the full album, along with an improvised session, Hippolytos.
The group rearranges the album tracks to make them effective as a concert piece, and this works very well. Quaeschning starts things off with a solo performance of Sequent C, and continues with the group performing Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares. Both arrangements stay close to the originals.
The group continues by sandwiching the track Phaedra inside the improvised Hippolytos. This works very effectively, because the group works with a palette of sounds that recalls TD’s ’70s sound, and uses phrases and sequences that take inspiration from Phaedra.
This flows directly into Phaedra 2024, a take that recreates the original’s spacey phased sound, but uses a more driving take on the sequence. It’s a great arrangement that preserves the spirit of Phaedra, while also making the track sound as modern and relevant as ever.
The second half of the performance will be more familiar to anyone that’s followed the latest incarnation of Tangerine Dream. The band plays an hour of their greatest hits, including “Quantum Years’ arrangements of tracks like Sorcerer Theme, Dolphin Dance and White Eagle. This section highlights that TD’s ‘greatest hits’ are evolving with their audience. It includes tracks like Los Santos City Map from their soundtrack to Grand Theft Auto V, and Continuum & Raum from their most recent album. They wrap the concert up with an encore, Phaedra 2022.
The performance offers excellent sound, with crowd noise primarily limited to the beginning and end of the two main sections.
The album is offered in two physical formats. The vinyl version features three LPs in a gatefold sleeve, with an 8-page printed booklet. The CD version features two discs in a tri-fold sleeve, with a smaller version of the booklet. The album notes feature Froese’s take on the creation of Phaedra, comments from Bianca Froese-Acquaye on the albums continuing relevance and Quaeschning discusses some of the challenges and decisions behind arranging the classic album as a concert piece.
The performance at The Barbican was sold out, and it’s clear from the audience reaction captured in the recording that the performance was a crowd-pleaser. The new album captures that magic, and makes the case that – even after more than 50 years – there’s still a place for Tangerine Dream.
50 Years of Phaedra: At The Barbican is available now on CD & vinyl.
