Classical album of the week - Bates: The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs

The Guardian 60

Pentatone, two CDs

Mason Bates’s clever fusions of electronic sounds with big-boned orchestral writing have made his concert works very popular in the US. A Bates opera was a natural next step, and a stage work about the life of the Apple founder Steve Jobs made a neat fit for a composer whose use of technology and ability to commute easily across stylistic boundaries has won him so many admirers. With a libretto by Mark Campbell, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs received its premiere at Santa Fe a year ago; the recording comes from those performances.

Musically and dramatically it’s an assured enough first opera, if an unremarkable one. Running for 95 minutes in a single span, its 20 scenes shuttle forwards and backwards over the crucial moments in Jobs’s life. A prologue and epilogue are set in the Jobs family home in 1965, and the penultimate scene takes place at his memorial service in 2011, while the dramatic climax comes with his decision to leave Apple in 1985, only to return 12 years later and initiate the series of products that made his and his company’s fortune.