These really are extraordinary works. Frisell plays the classicist. His jazz roots are the underpinning, but the compositions defer strictly to late 20th century classical “New Music”. Frisell is no stranger to that world. In 1995 he World premiered Steven Mackey’s “Deal” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group as part of the Green Umbrella concert series, a legacy of Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director and principle conductor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1992 to 2009.

It is interesting to note that Richter 858 pre-dates The Tristan Project, another phenomenal pairing of “Art” (Bill Viola) and composition (Richard Wagner). And while The Tristan Project is firmly embedded in both the pioneering worlds of video art and chromatic opera, Richter 858 feels the more ground breaking by making an associative leap from the static to the fluid. Frisell delivers a classical infrastructure with big emotional bearing. He is able to not only extract the “character” of the paintings, but delivers in each composition an emblematic portrait, all strung together, tightly knotted and sitting pretty like Jackie Kennedy’s pearls. I have a particular fondness for 858-6. Very dramatic and very satisfying.

Notes are from Richter 858: Outline re: Structure, Aesthetics, Questions, Thoughts by producer David Breskin.

858-5
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

In all case’s, musical choices are “motivated” by visual stimuli, however vague and ineffable and mysterious those motivations happen to be. The idea is to use the paintings as not just “inspiration” but “motivation”: I believe that the deeper and more intimately involved you are with looking, the more perfect will be the relationship between your music and Richter’s paintings.

858-6
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

The music should deal with the idea of “The Series”: that is closely linked pieces, painted/composed (executed/performed) at the same time, with consistent applications and modes of making. The music should have some narrative or relational sense-however abstract. A sense of story, development, layering, beginning, ending: one thing in relation to the other.

858-7
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on aluminum, 50×72 cm

The pictures have their own speeds. Their own velocities. Their own frequencies. The music in some way could/should deal with this. Richter paints to music – no surprise when you look at his work. There are a lot of rhythmic things happening in the paintings. The music should respect these speeds and rhythms, but not slavishly so.

858-8
Abstract Picture, 1999
Oil on linen, 51×747 cm

I expect the music will delve deep into the language of Electric Guitar. These are shimmery “electric” paintings. They hold, bury, mix, and reveal a lot of visual nose – beautiful, aching, sweet, painful noise. In some ways you could say they are creations of different kinds if coloristic and structural noise, coming together to create an unusual composition, which – almost against its will – reveals beautiful melodies and harmonic cohesion.

RICHTER 858, published by The Shifting Foundation/SFMOMA (San Francisco 2002), ISBN 0-9718610-0-5 In 2002