Michael Mantler - The School of Understanding

Michael Mantler has worked exhaustively with text-settings since the early 1970s, putting hs favourite authors – including Beckett, Pinter, Gorey, Ungaretti, Soupault, Ernst Meister – to music. Samuel Beckett again gets the last word on School Of Understanding but elsewhere in this “sort-of-an-opera”, Mantler has – for the first time – written his own libretto. A double album, School Of Understanding is Mantler’s most ambitious undertaking to date. A relentless exploration of “communication” in society and the media, it features the Austrian trumpeter’s Copenhagen-based Chamber Music And Songs Ensemble, joined by a cast of singers and flanked by a string orchestra. Vocalists include four venerable names from the heyday of progressive rock: Jack Bruce, Robert Wyatt, Don Preston and John Greaves, respectively associated with Cream, Soft Machine, the Mothers of Invention and Henry Cow.