What is a concept album?
What are concept albums about? A silly starter for ten – they are about everything from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to The Dark Side of the Moon to Innervisions. But whatever individual concept albums are doing, from The Beatles to Pink Floyd and Stevie Wonder, there’s something that connects them all together: the idea of listening all the way through. Concept albums are made because the experience of the whole is greater than the sum of their parts.
And that’s the same principle that has always animated classical repertoires. It’s the entire point of the instrumental suite and the multi-movement symphony: you need to keep listening from the beginning to the end, because you can’t understand the meaning of the piece unless you stay with it from the opening bar to the final cadence.
How classical music gave birth to the concept album
In that sense, the whole concept of the concept album was born in classical cultures and developed by other genres in the recording era. What is surprising is that so many classical performers and producers didn’t take the opportunities of recording further, content that the concept of the pieces themselves was enough. Rather than innovating the idea of what a classical album might be, it was enough to get the K numbers and complete opuses down: instead of Pet Sounds, you might release a couple of symphonies of Haydn; instead of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, put out a set of the Op. 59 quartets of Beethoven.
But there have always been exceptions. The pianist Glenn Gould, for example, turned the studio into a crucible of his obsessive electric dreams, making each of his albums a conceptual odyssey that took in repertoire from Bach to Hindemith.
Younger artists are now embracing the classical concept album
And now, younger generations of musicians are at last waking up to the possibilities of the classical concept album. Just take the pianists: Alice Sara Ott turns her explorations of music like Chopin’s Op. 28 Preludes into a kaleidoscope of imagination in her Echoes of Life album, which puts Ligeti and Takemitsu alongside the Polish composer. Víkingur Ólafsson goes even further in a project like From Afar, making a 22-track sequence that connects Bach with Kurtág and Kaldalóns and creating a constellation of pieces whose resonances have a cumulative impact that you can only experience if you listen all the way through. Bruce Liu’s Lunaris puts Beethoven sonatas at the centre of a curated selection whose moonlit reflections encompass Schoenberg and Mompou, each illuminating the other.
It’s not only piano soloists like those three: there’s the guitarist Sean Shibe and his most recent record, Vesper; there are groups like 12 Ensemble and Aurora, and conductors such as last year’s BBC Music Magazine Award-winning Sascha Goetzel with his fin-de-siécle-focused record of Schreker, Krenek and Korngold. The concept album is making a comeback: keep listening, from the opening track to the final chord.
