FM Concerts 2025
Preserved for posterity in front of the audience, symphonic elevation of progressive new-age panorama is restored to embrace eternity.
The Original Hergest Ridge
Not exactly a classic case of difficult second album, “Hergest Ridge” seemed too different from its acclaimed predecessor to invoke comparisons, yet the structural similarities between this album and “Tubular Bells” made parallels inescapable, despite Mike Oldfield’s debut being driven by performance per se and his sophomore offering inspired by rural beauty. The composer wasn’t too happy with the results of his 1974 endeavor, where a lot of nuances got blurred in the mix to the extent of the record sounding amorphous enough to dissolve the epic’s dramatic swells in its overall melodic spell, something that David Bedford, who conducted strings and choir on the platter, decided to remedy in the piece’s orchestral version. Bedford’s reimagining of the quasi-symphony laid down in London on December 9th, 1974 would end up on bootlegs, but the September 5th, 1975 performance from Glasgow remained largely unheard – possibly because Oldfield didn’t attend those concerts.
Parts of the show with the Scottish National Orchestra emerged on the audio track of “The Space Movie” in 1979, yet a precious cassette discovered five decades after the broadcast and painstakingly restored allows the listener to assess the original scope “Hergest Ridge” strived for. As David transferred almost all of the album’s electric passages to a wider strings spectrum and the brass and further expanded the record’s woodwind and percussive figures, the natural wonder of Mike’s melodies came to the fore. But since removing guitar from the picture – and even significantly changing the instrument’s tone – seemed sacrilegious, Steve Hillage stepped in to play in both The Royal Albert Hall and Kelvin Hall to reprise its cosmic flights. Still, alongside female vocals, it’s a mere, if impressive, strand of the overall stunning panorama the other musicians unfold here under the arranger’s watchful eye – and the panorama is exquisitely multidimensional, pushing every button in the aural spectators’ psyche and eliciting rapture from their bodies as well, especially towards the roaring finale.
A fantastic find
*****
