Summary
It had to come: the music of After Crying played by an orchestra. The music is in principle well suited for this. Now to hear whether this pans out in practice.

The music
The beginning of the album is full of drama and quite a bit of tenseness. The music has a lot of aspects of modern cinema music. The middle part is quite proggy and busy with plenty of trumpet. Struggle For Life is one of the major After Crying tracks and it is split by a short track called Enigma. The melodies of Struggle For Life are majestic and broken only by a rather adverse in part II.
The second movement opens with the mystery of Suburban Night. Cello and guitar build a good atmosphere and the trumpet is extremely touching. Cool Night has piano for the most part and some vocals as well, but they sound very far away. Not well produced or recorded probably. Night-Red is a new After Crying track and combines film music with tense Crimsonesque passages. The final part of the movement is Cool Night Reprise which has somewehat jazzy sounding vocals.
After the orchestral Arrival Manticore, Aqua is much more soothing, fiddly but melodious. Intermezzo seems to me a bit shrill and sounds somewhat Arabic in melody. The final part is like piano music for the silent movies of the twenties. This is so far the weakest movement.
And it turns out to be the one, because the final movement is the best. Starting off with the tenseness of Big Evil Fun Fair Finale (simply called Finale here), we continue and close with the over 11 minutes of Shinin'. This songs combines a certain lightheadedness with a ponderous other side. The vocals are a bit like The Lovers of Steve Hackett. A very moody track on the whole and beautiful at that.

Conclusion
The cd is only 55 minutes, but the concert was much longer. I would certainly like to hear the rest as well, because this is very good. For the people who found their studio albums a bit too fickle, this is a very good place to start.

Jurriaan Hage