Southbank Centre - Xenakis at 100, 8 October 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

O-Mega; Palimpsest; Echange; Thalleïn for ensemble

Concret PH; Kottos; Rebonds A, Rebonds B

Psappha; Ikhoor; Tetras; Mikka and Mikka ‘S’; Pléïades

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Philip Howard (piano)

Tim Gill (cello)

Oliver Lowe, Colin Currie (percussion)

London Sinfonietta

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

JACK Quartet

Colin Currie Group

Iannis Xenakis’s music does not age. It is an ahistorical cliché to say so, likewise to say how stark, elemental, uncompromising, visceral, mysterious, unique, and so on it is. Those descriptions retain their force, whilst remaining open to exception and to broader questioning. But they came to many listeners’ mind, judging by the general conversation at the Queen Elizabeth Hall throughout this Xenakis Day, seeming to lodge themselves in a sort of collective consciousness through which works and performances could be heard. I did not, alas, hear all of the day’s events, but I attended the two principal concerts in the hall itself, hearing also three of the works on offer in the foyer in between. It was, I think, enough—although the way the closing Pléïades left one aurally bludgeoned was less on account of the astounding performances from the Colin Corrie Group of six percussionists than the unsuitability of the hall: a pity, one necessarily felt, whilst recognising that the Southbank Centre had done what it could.

The first works I heard were four from the London Sinfonietta and Geoffrey Paterson, in performances like everything here that seemed quite beyond reproach. (If you are going to play Xenakis, you tend to do it well.) O-Mega, for percussion and ensemble, made for a splendid opener; after that, his final work, we could only go back, at least temporally. Oliver Lowe’s opening bongo tattoo, a call to something, it seemed, met with implacable wind response, a hieratic ritual initiated in a theatre of music that might always have been, except it had not. Moving from 1997 to 1979, Palimpsest, for eleven instruments, offered piano (and other) scales reinvented before our ears, its lines unmistakeably architectural, even engineered—to borrow a little too readily from the composer’s other callings. Sawmill strings, wind fractals in which one could see as well as hear the geometry, virtuoso drumming and so much more: this was not easy listening, nor was it supposed to be. It was quite a journey to final, mesmerising piano-and-drum-led climax.

Échange, for bass clarinet (Mark van de Wiel) and ensemble, was similarly yet entirely differently primal. Again, it sounded unmistakeably that ‘this was how it must be’, in a world of violence (like our own) quite unconcealed. How can we continue so blithely, it seemed to ask, in a world imperilled by nuclear attack? Xenakis must have asked the same thing, or so we fancied. And yet, life in all its physicality, all its mental wonder, continued. The bass clarinet, somewhere between priest and Pierrot, bade new sounds emerge at will, though that will was again sometimes no mean effort. The ensemble could, though, and did respond. The startling weirdness of an E-flat major chord could hardly have sounded more alien: a signal, it seemed, from yet another planet.

Thalleïn, the Sinfonietta’s first commission (1984) from Xenakis, was as implacable as anything yet heard, perhaps still more so. Siren-like—ambulance, not temptress—its opening had us browbeaten, and thereby strangely receptive to proliferating subtleties to come, even to the point of finding them inviting. Masses of sound continued to confront us to exhilarating effect. Ascending and descending scales led both ways, so it seemed, to hell, their mockery a deeply serious business. Piccolo pierced our consciousness, at times painfully, like a moment of alarm on an intensive care unit screen. There was blood-letting aplenty, the final string swarms, punctuated by percussion, as far as ever from consolation. 

Concret PH, like most, possibly all, musique concrete actually did seem to have aged—though even that is dependent on our knowing the unknowable Rankean ‘how it really was’, and how can we? Even if we had been there, in the 1958 Expo Philips Pavilion Xenakis as Le Corbusier’s assistant designed, memory would play its tricks. There is no ‘authenticity’; there never was; and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a charlatan. How admirably full of integrity Xenakis and his fellow avant-gardists seem contrasted with those snake-oil-salesmen to come. No, you cannot hear the St Matthew Passion as if you had never heard Xenakis; more to the point, why would you wish to? Or is that just to invest my own fantasy of postwar ‘inauthenticity’ as super- or supra-authenticity? There was, at any rate, room for fantasy here, if one closed one’s eyes and listened. Here was another world: inaccessible, perhaps, like that of Bach’s Leipzig, yet an idea not without its own seduction. 

Tim Gill’s performance of Kottos for cello really deserved the main hall, as did Lowe’s Rebonds A and Rebonds B. They were mightily fine accounts, though, wherever one heard them, the first’s evocation of the horrible hundred-armed creature, progeny of Uranus and Gaia, a song both fragile and stark: deeply rooted, if hardly in the conventional harmonic sense. Or perhaps it was, for I felt the implication at least of a harmonic language, even if I could never know it, even if it were in fact unknowable. There was whimsy in the asides, even as the ‘creature’ gained strength. And the music reached something akin to ecstasy, doubtless more effortful than that of Messiaen, yet no less genuine for that. The state of frenzy reached was a liberation of sorts, not least amidst the hell of our current existence. Both Rebonds pieces, A in particular, invoked—even if we knew not what (that inscrutability again). One was drawn in, less hypnotised than converted, in powerfully cumulative, remarkably different experiences of control and abandon. 

In the evening, Colin Currie’s Psappha seemed almost designed to cement our growing sense of structure as fundamental in an emphatic, again quasi-engineered sense to Xenakis’s work. The extraordinary musicianship on show never threatened to take on a life of its own; structure remained paramount. There seemed no other way. And the silences: they might almost have been from Bruckner. Here, again, was a summoning both archaic and not. Pléïades, here ordered ‘Metaux’, ‘Claviers’, ‘Peaux’, ‘Mélanges’, suffered, as I said, from an ear-splitting quality that made it, for me at least, too difficult to take, the sixxens too rarely emerging, to quote Xenakis, as ‘clouds, nebulas, and galaxies of the fragmented dust of beats’. Even here, though, ‘the idea of periodicity, repetition, duplication, faithful, pseudo-faithful,’ and above all ‘unfaithful copy’ shone through. ‘Claviers’ came closer to polyphony, its ripples even a little Boulezian, though I am not sure either composer would have approved of the comparison. Its patterns emerged as if on multiple screens before our ears. Drummed hypnosis in ‘Peaux’ prepared the way for less a synthesis or recapitulation than a gigantic rehearing, even rewriting when all instruments united in ‘Mélanges’. It was ear-splitting, again, at times, but in quite an aural landscape, at times almost dreamed.

Rhythm, its problems and opportunities, had haunted much of the string music in between, especially Ikhoor for string trio and Tetras for string quartet, both given by the JACK Quartet. Vivid, fiercely directed narratives marked out both, as did superhuman unanimity of purpose. Tetras seemed somehow both stranger and familiar, the strangeness heightened by sounds I might have sworn had emerged from electronics, did I not know otherwise. Voices, of whatever sort, bore witness, as if from Luigi Nono’s long-estranged cousin. Two works for violin solo, Mikka and Mikka ‘S’, were given by the quartet member absent for the trio, Austin Wulliman. Measured swarming, control in dilemma, line tracked as if in a real-time graph: throughout one ‘felt’ the mathematics, or imagined one did. As in every performance here, there was a rightness that left one knowing, like this music or not, it deserved as well as demanded to be heard.

Wien Modern (4): Currie/VSO/Nielsen – Gruber and Staud, 15 November 2015

Konzerthaus, Vienna

HK Gruber – into the open… (Austrian premiere)

Johannes Maria Staud – Zimt: Ein Diptychon für Bruno Schulz (Austrian premiere)

Colin Currie (percussion)

Vienna Symphony Orchestra

Erik Nielsen (conductor)

 

Two works by Austrian composers received their Austrian premieres in excellent performances from the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Erik Nielsen. HK Gruber’s into the open…, for percussion and orchestra was written as a tribute to David Drew. (Drew died during its composition.) The opening section is still, full of suspense. I read later Gruber’s description of it as a ‘slow, meditative processional, as if the soloist is walking through a “pitch landscape”,’ which seems to me a description as beautiful as it is accurate. Colin Currie, as ever a supremely musical and assured artist, had mostly tuned percussion to deal with as he walked through that landscape. I thought at the time of it as an orchestral backdrop, with strong echoes of Berg. The feeling of suspense was powerfully maintained, as much a tribute to Nielsen’s conducting as to Gruber’s writing. Eventually, full brass chords, which might have come from Weill, announced a new section. ‘Partway into the single movement span,’ I subsequently read, ‘I heard of the death of David Drew and this influenced the course of the rest of the piece, but the first section now seems to be a premonition of what the work would become.’ Balletic, Prokofiev-like music was next, or soon, up, Currie weaving his percussionist’s web around it. Gruber quite right to point to his twin qualities as ‘precision time-piece’ and, in slower, lyrical music, being ‘more like a violinist, cellist, or even a singer, drawing out sustained melody from the percussion instruments’. Old dances sounded, but never quite as pastiche; there was no doubting the Viennese quality of the music, even if it were Vienna ‘of a certain age’ rather than ‘Wien Modern’. A Stravinsky-like passage caught the ear. The music was easy to listen to, but interesting to listen to as well.

In the second half, we heard Johannes Maria Staud’s Zimt: Ein Diptychon für Bruno Schulz. I was a little unsure why an orchestral diptych for a Polish-Jewish poet should be called Cinnamon, but after reading on the train home, learned that it must have been a reference to Schulz’s reminiscences of childhood, Die Zimtläden, published in 1934. Reading that and other works by Schulz clearly made a great impression upon Staud; he writes of him as ‘like a meteorite’ and a ‘visionary’. In performance, opening percussion, of which there is much in Staud’s piece (five instrumentalists, I think, including a timpanist), formed something of a connection with the first half. An orchestral passage put me in mind of the drowning music from Wozzeck, the harmony quite similar, the orchestration less so, but undoubtedly virtuosic. Syncopations seemed in relatively conventional fashion to denote, or at least to suggest, unease. Riotous music evoked, for me at least, the world of Boulez’s orchestral Notations. The music disappeared – upwards. Presumably far from coincidentally, the second movement opened with an unmistakeable series of tonal descents. Again, there was no doubting the virtuosity of Staud’s handling of the orchestra, nor the virtuosity of the performances from all concerned. Downward glissandi continued to be prominent, counterbalanced by their inversions. Some of the material sounded similar to that of the first movement, but transformed by its context. Again, there was a good deal of riotous Notations-like writing; but this was a riot constantly changing in nature, the writing and performance as detailed as they were exuberant.

Currie/Hodges/Summers/Aurora Orchestra/Ollu et al. - Stockhausen and Boulez, 5 October 2013

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Stockhausen – Gesang der Jünglinge

Stockhausen – Kontakte

Boulez – Le Marteau sans maître

Sound Intermedia

Colin Currie (percussion)

Nicholas Hodges (piano)

Hilary Summers (contralto)

Members of the Aurora Orchestra

Franck Ollu (conductor)

 

Not for the first time, a concert of post-war avant-garde music showed what a thirst there is to hear music from this scandalously neglected area of the repertoire performed. The Queen Elizabeth Hall was sold out, a friend of mine having bought just in time one of the last remaining tickets. Whatever the reasons for not performing this music might be, lack of interest and demand is certainly not one. Whilst some of the selections for the Southbank Centre’s Rest is Noise season have to my mind been baffling – take, for instance, the wildly exaggerated importance soon to be ascribed to the tedious outpourings of minimalism, ‘holy’ and otherwise – the only regret here is that we could not hear more from a period whose music remains at least as bracing, as vital, as it did when first written and first performed. Indeed, as some though by no means all orchestras and halls fall back upon crowd-pleasing aural junk food as their token ‘modern music’, it becomes all the more necessary to hear, as it were, the real thing: Neue Musik, be it Stockhausen, Lachenmann, Schoenberg, or Bach.

Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge proves a quickening experience every time one hears it. We have lost the shock value of a piece of ‘merely’ electronic music; that will probably never return. But we have gained the ability to hear such a piece as a repertoire work, a classic, with both the advantages and dangers that entails. This time around, I was taken anew by the sense, early on though not only early on, of seeming aurally and of course spatially the very company of heaven. Stockhausen’s music might not sound ‘like’, say, the Sanctus from Bach’s B minor Mass, but the effect, the experience might not be entirely different. The flames of the text’s fiery furnace (Daniel 3) flickered as bright as ever, perhaps still more so; I could certainly feel the heat. Later, it was as if we were approaching the sanctuary, or a sanctuary, itself, whatever that might be. Musical? Divine? Were there already premonitions of the cosmogony of Licht? The composer’s heterodox Catholic mysticism seemed almost as strong as that of Messiaen; so, of course, did his technical radicalism.

 

It was salutary to be reminded by Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s informative programme notes that Shostakovich denounced Stockhausen as a representative of ‘decadent capitalist culture’ at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The multifarious disciples of the latter-day St Dmitri would do well to remember that aggressive æsthetic attacks were far from the sole province of the avant-garde. Stockhausen, who began work on Kontakte in the same year as Shostakovich’s attack, was better advised to respond with a work whose compositional riches dwarf anything the Soviet composer could have dreamed of, though a little more than twenty years later, Helmut Lachenmann’s ‘Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze’ would deal with more or less the same issue:

 

Can there be a more presumptuous and, at the same time, ignorant programme than the propagation of a “human art” (in contrast to the up-to-now inhuman ...) and then the claim to be composing ‘finally, again, for the public’? For whom then were Nono’s Il canto sospeso, La terra e la campagna, Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Kontakte, Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître, Berio’s Epifania and Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra composed? Reproaching a hermetically sealed music for insiders only repeats the favourite excuse of a public which runs for cover when faced with works like those just names. It runs because it is more affected by the emotive power experienced in these works than it is entertained by the emotions of the collected neo-symphonists.

 

At any rate, dspite a barbaric intervention of premature applause – Soviet methods for dealing with such behaviour might usefully be employed here – Nicholas Hodges, Colin Currie, and Sound Intermedia unleashed a dazzling display of virtuosity that was yet entirely at the service of Stockhausen’s endlessly restive imagination. Even a mobile telephone call for once seemed almost to blend with the array of percussive and electronic sonorities. As with any work worth its salt, one experiences different facets and listens in different ways on different occasions. I was struck here by the contest between what one might characterise as dialectical opposing forces: stillness and hyper-activity, peace and violence, attack and aural reconciliation, intimacy (think for instance, of the almost vocal duet between piano and xylophone) and swarming, swirling, all-enveloping extroversion as electronics and ‘conventional’ instruments enhance the capabilities of each other and indeed of the audience itself. Above all, there was a true sense of the opening up of possibilities, the greatest legacy of a ‘Darmstadt’ that could not have been further removed from that of doctrinaire caricature. (It was almost quaintly ‘retro’ to see a couple of people walk out.) Above all, we were reacquainted with a composer whose sheer inventiveness places him with Haydn.

 

For the second half, Hilary Summers joined players of the Aurora Orchestra under Frank Ollu for what perhaps continues to be the emblematic musical work of the 1950s, Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître. For Boulez, the high watermark of total serialism has already passed; as our distance from its origins increases from its origins, we increasingly seem to perform and to hear the work as much as a labyrinthine extension of Schoenberg and Berg, towards whose nostalgia the young(ish) Boulez felt more than a little suspicion, as to Webern’s crystalline purity. The difference of the sound world from anything we had heard from Stockhausen was immediately apparent. So indeed was every aspect of the compositional ‘voice’: again, an indication that there could have been nothing doctrinaire about the composers’ explorations. Exactitude and ‘expression’ were revealed as sides of the same coin, that old Schoenbergian – or indeed Bachian – coin of freedom and determinism. The players, amongst whom we should count the unmistakeable contralto of Summers, revelled in a seemingly limitless array of instrumental combinations. Though there were occasional, quite understandable, instances of hesitancy, for instance in ‘Commentaire II de “Bourreaux de solitude”,’ this was in most respects a commanding performance, those hangmen of solitude uncovering memories, fleeting, perhaps even imaginary, of Ravel’s ‘Le Gibet’ from Gaspard de la nuit, the second ‘commentary’ perhaps the most mesmerising of all. In keeping with the general theme of exploration, new worlds seemed to open up in the double of ‘Bel difice et les pressentiments’. Strands may have been brought together, but immediately they suggested, in true serialist fashion, new avenues to follow. As we know, this work was in many ways just the beginning – both for Boulez and his confrères.

 

Prom 20: Stockhausen, 2 August 2008

Royal Albert Hall

Stockhausen – GRUPPEN
Stockhausen – KLANG, thirteenth hour: COSMIC PULSES, for electronics (British premiere)
Stockhausen – KLANG, from the fifth hour: HARMONIEN, for solo trumpet (BBC commission: world premiere)
Stockhausen – KONTAKTE
Stockhausen – GRUPPEN (repeat performance)

Marco Blaauw (trumpet)
Nicolas Hodges (piano)
Colin Currie (percussion)
Kathinka Pasveer (sound projection for KLANG)
Bryan Wolf (sound projection for KONTAKTE)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)
Pascal Rophé (conductor)

Stockhausen is dead; long live Stockhausen! After a lengthy period in which he and his music – and especially his later music, for which, read the gargantuan LICHT cycle – became distinctly unfashionable in many circles, the composer’s death at the end of last year seems to have triggered a reappraisal. This is just the kind of effort to which the Proms should be contributing; the advent of Roger Wright at its helm may yet rescue the series from its Kenyon-era doldrums. KLANG, or ‘sound,’ will be the title of the Southbank Centre’s forthcoming week-long tribute in November. It refers to his post-LICHT cycle of works, projected to cover the twenty-four hours of the day. Cut short by his death, two sections were given here: the thirteenth ‘hour’ receiving its first British performance and part of the fifth hour its first anywhere. The word ‘Klang’ also points to one of Stockhausen’s greatest achievements –although far from the only one – namely, his manifold pioneering explorations in terms of sound.

GRUPPEN was the Alpha and Omega of this concert. A welcome development of recent Stockhausen ‘performance practice’ has been a tendency to perform the work twice in a single concert. Performances of this tremendous work for three orchestras are unsurprisingly rare, so a second audition grants a welcome opportunity to experience and to comprehend further. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra will adopt the same practice, in a September concert at Tempelhof Airport, which will mouth-wateringly include Messiaen’s Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorem. An important thing to remember concerning GRUPPEN is that it was not intended as a spatial work; rather, the division of the large – though hardly unprecedentedly so – orchestra of 109 players results from the impossibility of directing the musicians in several different metronomic tempi at once. Virtue was made of necessity, however, and Stockhausen’s fascination with the movement of sounds in space was furthered, which in turn furthered his move away from composition with ‘points’ (Punkte) towards ‘groups’ (Gruppen), in which the former parameters of sound – pitch, duration, volume, and timbre – combine and in which some may once again begin to predominate over others. (It is a characteristic of Stockhausen’s works that their names are often extremely helpful in delineating their principal concern. PUNKTE will be performed later this season.) Having stripped not just music but even sound itself down to their constituent elements, he begins, indeed is almost compelled, to put them back together. In the act of re-combination, however, we experience something genuinely new.

The overlapping presentation of groups – 174 of them in total – performed at different tempi is, then, the material of the work. These present performances accomplished that magnificently, for which all three conductors – David Robertson, Martyn Brabbins (at very short notice), and Pascal Rophé – and all members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra should be praised. Something was lost through the positioning of the orchestras, in that very few members of the audience would have been surrounded by them, yet one could nevertheless hear them separately and together, with a reasonable degree of spatial transfer and dialogue. Moreover, timbral clarity was often extremely impressive, especially so given the cavernous acoustic of the Royal Albert Hall, which somehow actually seemed to benefit the work. Percussion instruments and even the harps were often strikingly loud, although never un-variegated. Indeed, I was struck not only by confirmation of the importance of the percussion section for so much twentieth-century music, but also by the sheer tonal variety contained and expressed within. Spatial dialogue between the brass instruments of the three orchestras put me in mind of the Gabrielis, although this music grew overwhelmingly with a spellbinding intensity quite foreign to Venetian forebears. The work and performances as a whole exhibited a range from the utmost delicacy to teeming cacophony, rendering us closer to Messiaen than I might have expected. Stockhausen rarely nods to tradition but the dying away of the final horn call presented a perhaps unexpected reference back to German Romanticism. Yet, whatever odd references one might make for oneself – cowbells and Mahler, for instance – the overriding impression was of original genius, in what many still consider to be the composer’s towering masterpiece.

GRUPPEN was composed more than fifty years ago (1955-7, with its premiere in 1958). It remains an enthralling contemporary experience, yet Stockhausen’s concerns would unsurprisingly lead him further and further into the electronic realm. COSMIC PULSES (2006-7), here receiving its British premiere, is a purely electronic work. It may, as Robert Worby writes in his programme notes, ‘be the most spatially complex piece that Stockhausen ever produced’. Stockhausen told Worby in an 1997 interview:

Already in 1958 to 1960 I made a lot of experiments in a special hall in order to find out what speed I could composer for different sounds, what speed they could pass through the space, from one speaker group to the other, and most of the time one is not aware of the loudspeakers any more, but the sounds moving with different speeds in diagonal directions or in a circle, in rotation left-wise, right-wise, or the sound is coming from only one of the angles, et cetera. All the variations became part of my composition as harmony and melody, rhythm and dynamics.

Developments in technology and in Stockhausen’s compositional technique eventually led him to the situation at which he could write COSMIC PULSES. It is made up of twenty-four pitch and rhythm ‘loops’, themselves made up of one to twenty-four pitches, in twenty-four different registers. They rotate at twenty-four different speeds around eight loudspeakers and are ‘successively layered together from low to high and from the slowest to the fastest tempo’. (The clarity of Worby’s notes was most helpful here.) Sound projection was by one of the composer’s two surviving companions, Kathinka Pasveer but this was essentially not a human ‘performance’ at all, something which at the end renders applause a little odd. In the meantime, however, we underwent an extraordinary experience.

Many of the lights were turned off, which enabled one all the better to concentrate upon the sonic extravaganza. (Some of those that remained on, needless to say, were the hideous green ‘Fire Exit’ signs. I should have been tempted to consider ‘Health and Safety’ the three most depressing words in the English language, had not ‘replacement bus service’ blighted my journeys to and from London.) The sounds were of course ever changing yet sometimes, at least, strangely familiar. Purely electronic, one could yet discern the impression – especially at the outset – of an organ. Soon bells or their equivalent could be heard and even, a little later, the hint of a helicopter, which inevitably reminded me of the composer’s notorious string quartet. Sound was constantly moving and swirling, behind, in front, and above. One gained a sense of some great cosmic drama unfolding. We were spectators, or rather auditors, rather than participants, yet it would somehow affect us, even if we knew not how. Was this Zukunftsmusik? Sometimes it seemed more real – i.e., what was actually happening – than art, sometimes less so. It was fantastically, almost fanatically, detailed, yet there was a broader discernible development too; it teemed with strange, new life, or was it death? Of course, it needs no images, yet I wondered how it would work in a state-of-the-art cinema. If Wagner had wished, having created the invisible orchestra, to create an invisible theatre, Stockhausen might have invisible screen action. (It is interesting nevertheless to speculate what a Stanley Kubrick might have done with such music.) I also wondered what the children at the previous week’s ‘Doctor Who Prom’ would have made of this. Free of many adult preconceptions, I suspect they would have been utterly bowled over by it. Was this the TARDIS (‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Space’: oddly Stockhausen-like) I heard before me at one point? At the end, it was as if whatever form of alien intelligence had visited us was taking its leave, not simply in terms of it coming to an end, but in a musical sense of leave-taking and disappearance into some strange beyond.

How on earth – or wherever we might be – might one be able, I asked myself, to deal with twenty-four ‘hours’ of such music? HARMONIEN (‘Harmonies’) rendered the question redundant, for this piece, receiving its world premiere, was very different indeed. Here the sound projection was unobtrusive, simply a matter of projection, for this was to all intents and purposes a solo work. Together with versions for bass clarinet and for flute, it forms the fifth hour of KLANG. It was an opportunity for solo trumpeter, Marco Blauuw, to shine and he took it – with mesmerising musicality, theatricality, and virtuosity. A slow introduction of four intoned notes, between which the trumpeter recites the words, ‘Lob’, ‘Sei’, ‘Gott’ (‘God be praised’), is followed by twenty-four – that number of hours again – melodies, each of which is repeated at different pitches in a loop, which is then in turn repeated different numbers of times, becoming slower and quieter. Such provides the harmonic – yes, harmonic: once again, the clue lies in the title – structure for the work and the entire basis for the trumpeter’s address to what seemed to be treated more as a congregation than a mere audience. For the almost liturgical presentation not only of the words but also of the music, not unlike the call of a shofar, reminded us of the world of LICHT. The various mutes, affixed like a belt around Blauuw’s waist, had a visual as well as a sonic impact. Pitches were circled but, in the midst of considerable pitch repetition, something else was always changing: duration, volume, etc. Once I fancied I could discern a reminiscence of a Bach chorale: not strictly true of course, yet the correspondences one makes are not always merely absurd, for this was clearly a mysterious rite of some kind. Likewise the appearances towards the end of a perfect fifth call inevitably put me in mind of other trumpet calls. And then the observance was concluded.

KONTAKTE (1959-60) was given in its version for piano, percussion, and electronics. (There is also a purely electronic version.) This is another work concerned with the spatial construction of sound. The composer invented a ‘rotation table’, upon which a loudspeaker was placed, whose rotation would enable it to face four microphones placed in a square around it; the microphones were connected to the four tracks of the tape, thereby permitting – albeit with much less elaborate technology – a precursor to the movements in space we had previously heard in COSMIC PULSES. Stockhausen is also concerned here with the relationship between parameters of rhythm and pitch, in the sense that increases in tempo eventually permit the creation of a definite pitch, which becomes higher the faster with greater frequency of the fundamental clicks (or pulses) from the speakers. Nor one should forget – one certainly could not do so in the hall – the premium placed upon virtuosity, not for its own sake, but necessary to further Stockhausen’s explorations. Colin Currie and Nicolas Hodges, with Bryan Wolf on sound projection, presented a veritable tour de force. The music, unsurprisingly, sounded more abrasive, more pointillistic – more human? – than COSMIC PULSES. Webern is still, just about, a discernible starting ‘point’ – in more sense than one. The piano is treated in a largely percussive fashion, rendering this far more a ‘percussion’ than a ‘piano’ work, even when one bears in mind Stockhausen’s preceding Klavierstücke. Hodges sometimes had to play additional percussion as well as his piano part. I could hear the scene being set for pieces such as Helmut Lachenmann’s Interieur I for solo percussion, his first acknowledged work, yet Stockhausen’s spatial concerns added – again in more than one sense – at least one extra dimension. There is a bright, metallic quality to the music, very much of its time. One could almost see through the sound alone a post-war West German radio studio. Indeed, I was slightly taken aback as to how evocative of its time KONTAKTE now sounded. Whether that suggests that it is becoming dated or classicised remains to be discerned. At any rate, the music faded away splendidly into a prolonged silence. That silence might well have come about from the audience’s uncertainty as to whether the piece was finished, but the effect was nevertheless appropriate. It was certainly followed by vigorous deserved applause for the performers. The reprise of GRUPPEN then almost took on the quality of an encore, with musicians and audience alike less tense, more ready to enjoy themselves: a fitting conclusion to a bold and successful concert.