Grosser Sendesaal des rbb and
Kammermusiksaal
Telemusik (1966)
Refrain (1959)
Zyklus (1959)
Kontakte (1958-60)
Mantra (1970)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano, celesta)
Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)
Benjamin Kobler (piano)
Tamara Stefanovich (piano)
Marco Stroppa (electronics)
For two further concerts of
music by Stockhausen we moved to the splendid Westend concert hall in Hans
Poelzig’s Haus des Rundfunks for a varied programme of electronic and ensemble
music, before returning to the Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal for Mantra. (Alas, I had to hurry back to
London for a meeting and thus missed the final event, a performance of Inori.)
The purely electronic Telemusik opened the first concert. If I
say that it sounds more than ever a work of its time, I do not mean that in a
disparaging sense; it does not only
sound as such. But there is something engagingly remote – just as there will be
for Mozart – as well as close to us in hearing such a work; it is now, as
indeed one might say of any of these works, a classic. The lights went off. A
projected sun appeared above the stage. Who knows which? Our own, under which
the languages and cultures of the world make hay before the end of days?
Sirius? Some other? A generic light, even? We seemed to hear its rays, their
light, their refraction, even perhaps reflection (in whatever sense you care).
Songs of the world, of some other world, were heard, sung, chanted, reinvented.
A world of music(s) was ours and yet was not; it was now of the past, almost as
if we had visited it, as Stockhausen once had visited us. And with that, we
made our own synthesis – even in, perhaps particularly
in a work without visible ‘performance’. Make of that what you will; that,
perhaps, is the point.
Refrain, for three performers (Benjamin Kobler on
piano, Pierre-Laurent Aimard on celesta, and Dirk Rothbrust on percussion),
came next. If Telemusik offered
ritual of a sort both old and new, so too did this. I could not help but wonder
whether Boulez had occasionally had it in mind as a precursor to his orchestral
Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. It
was mesmerising to watch as well as to listen to; the distinction seemed
perhaps unusually false. Serialist theatre, in which freedom and organisation
were revealed as two sides of the same coin, revealed silence also to be as
crucial as it would be to Bruckner (that despite the giggles of two audience
members next to me). Those strange cries of – to? – another world seemed
already to look forward to Mantra and
the Inori I was fated not to hear.
What an array of instruments
one sees and hears in Zyklus, for
solo percussionist. I say that not simply, or even principally, in terms of
quantity; anyone, given a budget, can offer a large number of instruments. But
here the arrangement, the interrelationship, the unity in diversity and vice versa again suggested a form of
serialist music theatre for all the senses. Rothbrust’s virtuosity was
astounding, but it rightly never came across as mere virtuosity; this was a
performance, an act of formal revelation. Variety of attack and reverberation struck
as the work of a piano writ large: again, surely implications or at least
parallels for later works by both Stockhausen and Boulez. Bells seemed to
recall in context both previous works on the programme. Aimard and Kobler both
crept into the hall to listen, their collegiality richly rewarded indeed.
After the interval, Aimard,
Rothbrust, and Marco Stroppa (electronics) gave us another fine performance:
this time of Kontakte. A spatial
element always seems to bring out something very special in Stockhausen – and so
it was here. So too does theatre, of whatever kind, the piece initiated by
Aimard’s rising to sound – not necessarily in the way the innocent eye and ear
might expect – the gong: a moment and sound with clear implications for what
was to come. Electronic sounds enhanced, responded, developed, just as any
other chamber music response, if we may call it that, would. Rothbrust and
Stroppa reminded us that percussion and electronics the growth sections of twentieth-century music, perhaps not only
Western art music. If anything, they – and Stockhausen – helped here to revive
the fortunes of the piano. Not, of course, that an artists such as Aimard needs
any such help, nor is his part restricted to the piano. His part at times
seemed to take off where the clusters of the tenth Klavierstück had left off. What virtuosity there was to be heard
here, both solo and ensemble: this was, as so often with Stockhausen, music
both as we knew it and as we did not.
Transformation – to be traced
back, if we wish, through Schoenberg and Liszt to Bach – was very much a key to
that work’s unendliche Melodie, to borrow
not entirely inappropriately from Wagner. So too it was for Mantra, at the Kammermusiksaal, in which
Aimard and Stroppa were joined by Tamara Stefanovich. Stockhausen was quite
clear that the unfolding of this work was not to be understood as variation
form, whatever it might seem to have in common with such writing – and performance.
For there is no variation as such, although there is much expansion and
contraction: perhaps not unlike another star or how we see, feel, and think
about it. So it was here, a fine, crucial line trod with care, understanding,
and the keenest sense of drama. That drama here, as elsewhere, was
architectonic, just as the architecture was dramatic. It was at times absurd:
absurd in its seriousness and absurd in its child-like absurdity. These were
players, these were outstanding performances in which we knew we were in the
safest as well as the most thrilling of hands. We could therefore surrender to
the telling of a story just as much as to the progression of a ritual. The more
we listened, the more we watched too, the more we heard and experienced. Form –
its importance can hardly be exaggerated here, both in itself and for so much
later music – was once again revealed in and through performance. One marvelled
in what Stockhausen elicited, what he re-invented, but above all in what he
said, in what he sang. A staccato sounded, perhaps even signified as if it had
never done so before, so too a tremolo, so even did an arpeggio. If Schoenberg had
felt the air of another planet, perhaps this was indeed the sound of something
that lay yet further beyond.
