Smoke, sometimes, gets in your ears. Neuma Records announces the release of Fumée, featuring world premiere recordings of three major orchestral works by British-American composer Geoffrey Gordon. Each composition transforms visual art into music: Willem de Kooning’s explosive Abstract Expressionism, a haunting Belle Époque chanson, and the early-20th-century Synchromist movement.

For some composers, visual art serves merely as inspiration, but in the musical imagination of Geoffrey Gordon, it becomes architecture — a way of shaping motion, color, emotional tension and sonic space into something almost tactile. Across Fumée, the latest release from Neuma Records, the British-American composer transforms paintings, poetry and philosophical ideas into vividly cinematic orchestral environments that feel less like conventional concert works than all-encompassing sensory experiences. Performed by an international roster of elite ensembles, conductors and soloists, the album reveals Gordon as a composer uniquely attuned to the psychological and physical properties of sound itself.

 What unites the three major works presented here is Gordon’s fascination with translation: color into orchestration, brushstroke into rhythm, poetic atmosphere into melodic contour. Yet despite the conceptual sophistication behind the music, Fumée never feels academic or remote. These are deeply visceral compositions, alive with dramatic movement, restless volatility and striking textural imagination.

Jonathan Widran/The JW Vibe

The Malmö Symphony Orchestra, soloist Carl Johan Stjernström and conductor Joachim Gustafsson perform Geoffrey Gordon's Prometheus for bass clarinet and orchestra on a disc of new bass clarinet concertos on the Tocatta NEXT label. Prometheus, after the Kafka treatment of the Greek legend, is a co-commission of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia, and Minnesota Orchestra.