Total Immersion - Oliver Knussen at 60, 4 November 2012

Music Hall, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Barbican Hall,

Masks, op.3 (1969)

Three Little Fantasias, op.6a (1970, rev.1983)
Trumpets, op.12 (1975)
Songs Without Voices, op.26 (1991-2)
Sonya’s Lullaby, op.16 (1977-8)
Océan de terre, op.10 (1972-3, rev.1976)

Martha Lloyd (flute)

Maud Millar, Olivia Robinson (sopranos)
Richard Uttley (piano)
Guildhall New Music Ensemble
Richard Baker (conductor)

Autumnal, op.14 (1976-7)

Variations, op.24 (1989)
Secret Psalm (1990, rev.2003)
Prayer Bell Sketch, op.29 (1997)
Ophelia’s Last Dance, op.32 (2009-10)

Alexandra Wood (violin)
Ryan Wigglesworth, Huw Watkins (piano)

Flourish with Fireworks, op.22 (1988, rev.1993)

Choral, op.8 (1970-72)
Whitman Settings, op.25a (1991, orch.1992)
Horn Concerto, op.28 (1994, rev.1995)
Two Organa, op.27 (1994)
Requiem – Songs for Sue, op.33 (2005-6)
Symphony no.3, op.18 (1973-9)

Claire Booth (soprano)

Martin Owen (horn)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Oliver Knussen (conductor)

The Barbican and BBC have done Oliver Knussen proud on his sixtieth birthday. Following magical performances of his two operas on the Saturday night, Sunday saw three concerts plus a typically informative, well-crafted, and enjoyable film from Barrie Gavin, made for Knussen’s fiftieth and now re-shown here. The only real disappointment was the round-table discussion following the film, which suffered from an evident lack of preparation, degenerating into, or rather never raising itself above, generalised, aimless chat. Anyway, enough of that.

 

The first concert, for which the Guildhall New Music Ensemble formed the backbone, presented various chamber works. Masks from 1969 was the earliest as well as the first. Written for solo flute with ad lib. glass chimes, it is harmless, though the flautist’s wandering around now seems very much of its time. Martha Lloyd (with George Barton on percussion) performed it ably; I fear that, unless the composer is Debussy or Berio, I am not the most responsive of listeners to the solo flute, its arabesques and so forth soon resembling each other all too readily. A step or two steps up nevertheless from the vapid conservatoire pieces one often endures from the instrument. Three Little Fantasies, for wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) was more interesting. For me, the first movement’s opening bars echoed in their intervals – and sonority – Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony. Soloists all had their chance thereafter to shine. (I am not sure why Bayan Northcott, in his notes, described this movement as ‘very short’; it did not seem much shorter than either of the other two.) The slow movement benefited from Stravinskian poise, though its predecessor might have benefited from greater precision at times, especially from the horn. Canonic procedures came audibly to the fore in the third movement. Trumpets, for soprano and three clarinets, sets a text by Georg Trakl. Language, vocal line and instrumentation – I immediately thought of Schoenberg’s op.29 – combined to give the piece a recognisably post-Schoenbergian air. Clarinet flourishes were expertly handled by all concerned, Millar offering a nicely variegated performance.

 

Songs without Voices is in four movements. The instrumentalist offered a much sharper response than in the wind quintet piece, suggesting that here, as in Trumpets, they benefited from Richard Baker’s presence on the podium. A string presence too was welcome, not only from the point of view of variety, but also because the Guildhall string players, the violinist and cellist in particular, played so well, the latter clearly relishing his second movement solo. Each movement was intricate and focused, both as work and performance. In Sonya’s Lullaby, for solo piano, Knussen echoes Debussy, Ravel, and Schoenberg once again. It is a finely wrought piece, the tritonal tension between B and F audibly pervasive – and I am sure it would be, even did one not have the technical language to describe it. Richard Uttley’s performance was as assured as the piano writing itself. The dark instrumental opening, de profundis, of Océan de terre registered deeply in every sense, Knussen’s material arising out of those depths, creating a ravishing sound-world, especially beautiful in terms of solo writing for violin and flute, as well as an active percussion section. Olivia Robinson’s deeply resonant, admirably detailed vocal performance deserves special praise.

 

The second of the two Guildhall-based concerts involved music for solo piano, solo violin, and violin and piano. Autumnal, the piece for violin and piano, showed, should anyone have doubted this, that audibly generative serial processes need not be opposed to freedom; indeed, they can act as its guarantor. Shades of Britten in the harmonies were brought to the fore lovingly by Alexandra Wood and Huw Watkins. Ryan Wigglesworth’s performance of the piano Variations brought us closer to Webern, as the title – and form – might imply. Again, Knussen’s developmental writing was ably brought out in performance. Secret Psalm, for solo violin, was a memorial piece for Michael Vyner, Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta. Northcott’s notes referred to the slow movement of a nineteenth-century violin concerto as the music closest to Vyner’s heart and Knussen’s point of reference; Wood’s warmly Romantic performance eventually revealed this to be the Brahms concerto. Schoenberg – op.11 and op.19 – was again evoked in the Prayer Bell Sketch, performed by Wigglesworth, Debussy too, even if mediated by Takemitsu, for whom the piece acts as a memorial. Its powerful climax is mitigated yet brought into retrospective relief by a magical falling away, tolling in the distance. Watkins performed the newest piece, Ophelia’s Last Dance with equal artistry. Knussen’s side-slipping harmonies put me in mind of Prokofiev; I even wondered whether the ‘graceful source melody’, in Northcott’s apt description, had a hint of Poulenc to it, but perhaps that was merely my fancy. Ghosts of Gaspard de la nuit certainly seemed to be fleetingly apparent – and could one ask for a better pianistic model than that? – if without Ravel’s hyper-virtuosity.

 

The final, orchestral concert opened with Flourish with Fireworks, scintillating as work and performance, debt to and difference from Stravinsky equally apparent. Choral, for wind, percussion, and double basses. It did not seem to me an especially characteristic piece, almost akin to Stockhausen’s surprisingly conventional Jubilee, which I heard Knussen conduct at the Proms in 2010. The Whitman Settings, sung by the ever-wonderful Claire Booth, served once again to remind us of Knussen’s gift for vocal composition – and his evident love of the soprano voice. Perhaps there was here a hint of Copland, injected into a world recognisable from the operas. The magical orchestral background of ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’ reminded us, should anyone have required that reminder, of the mutually beneficial experiences of Knussen’s work as composer and as conductor. The sense of open space – quite aptly for Whitman – seemed as much metaphysical as anything else. Martin Owen joined the band for a remarkable performance of the Horn Concerto, the soloist’s delivery as flawless and as committed as the conductor’s and the orchestra’s. (It is a while since I have heard the BBC SO on such excellent form: a cause for rejoicing in itself.) Perhaps it is a matter of the solo instrument as much as anything else, but late Romantic resonances seemed to abound, turns of phrase echoing Mahler and Strauss, the latter also seemingly an inspiration (Till Eulenspiegel) for the virtuosic orchestral writing. I wonder whether he also inspired, in his Second Horn Concerto, the interplay between solo and orchestral horns. Such fantastical Romanticism also brought the Henze of, say, the Fourth Symphony or König Hirsch, to mind. (Knussen has certainly conducted the symphony. Now if only someone would schedule the opera...)

 

The white-note musical box ‘Notre Dame des Jouets’ is, orchestrated, the first of the Two Organa. Its mechanised play provides a link, despite the very different chromatic language, with the finely yet densely layered second. Both exhibited, once again, Knussen’s characteristic brand of orchestral fantasy. Knussen dedicated the performance of Requiem – Songs for Sue, written as a memorial for his wife, to the memory of Henze, not just as composer, but as Knussen reminded us, a vital part of the ecosystem of London musical life, having assisted three generations of composers in this country as well as his own. The different languages – English, Spanish, English, and German – of the four songs elicited differences in vocal style, ably projected by Booth, but the character of each song was not so much a ‘reflection’ of the language as evidence of the synergy of setting and formal progression in combination.

 

Finally, we heard the Third Symphony. A fantastical sound world once again announced itself, with all manner of possible correspondences: Henze, Stravinsky, Ravel, Dukas, et al. But that is not to say they were necessarily ‘influences’, for this is very much a coherent whole; orchestral mastery sings its own praises. Structure, on both a micro- (motivic, cellular) as well as a macro-level was always admirably clear, without any sense of abstraction or imposition; it always seemed inherent in the material, which of course it is. The use of a chorale perhaps inevitably brought Messiaen to mind, though the differences are more telling. There is none of the hieratic quality of the French master in this work; it is far too busy, a star burning bright. And, unlike Messiaen, Knussen is never tempted, at least not on the evidence of these three concerts, to overstay his welcome. He only takes as much time as is absolutely necessary: a welcome attribute indeed.

Total Immersion – Hans Werner Henze Composer Day, 16 January 2010

Barbican Centre

Voices

Vocal Soloists from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Guildhall New Music Ensemble
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Toccata mistica
Variations, op. 13
Cherubino
Scorribanda pianistica
Fraternité
Symphony no.4
Elogium musicum (United Kingdom premiere)

Huw Watkins (piano)
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Oliver Knussen (conductor)

The BBC/Barbican Hans Werner Henze Day began with Barrie Gavin’s film, Memoirs of an Outsider, which includes interviews with Henze and a number of musicians close to him, as well as some ravishingly beautiful footage of the composer’s villa in the hills above Rome. I was unable to see it on this occasion but can wholeheartedly recommend it on DVD, or indeed should it be screened elsewhere.

Voices (1973), is described as ‘a collection of songs’ rather than a song-cycle, which seems just. Rather than being shared between two vocal soloists, the opportunity was granted to a number of singers (mezzos and tenors) from the Guildhall to contribute, which had the additional advantage of greater variety for the listener too. This is Henze at his most politically combative, taking us on a tour of the world’s disadvantaged, their voices hailing from Cuba, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Black America, Greece, Italy, and Germany. From the opening Los poetas cubanos ya no sueñan (from Heberto Padilla’s Fuera del juego) to Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s closing Das Blumenfest, the revolutionary intensity can hardly be faulted. It is a fascinating work, but not perhaps one that has dated so well as some others. To have well over an hour and a half (at least given the breaks required by performance) of such protest songs, without any especially obvious progression tends to reinforce the compendious quality of the enterprise – doubtless part of the point, but even so... That said, some songs, as one might expect, impress more than others and there are moments of great sonorous beauty. The strained beauty of the Ho Chi Minh Prison Song put me in mind of the torture scene from Nono’s Intolleranza, after which the accordion’s entry for Brecht’s Keiner oder alle could hardly have provided a greater contrast. Sharp-edged woodwind added to the evocation of Weimar and indeed of Weill (Mahagonny). Cabaret would return more than once, notably in the languorous, yet properly alienating sleaze – relatively speaking – of Brecht’s Gedanken eines Revuemädchen während des Entkleidungsaktes. No, of course the showgirl does not enjoy what she does; nor does she ‘feel’ anything. The several contributions from recorders proved haunting, fragile in their humanity, not least for the parents having to transport the coffins of the children of Man Quang (Erich Fried’s 42 Schulkinder). Haunting was also the word for Caino, in which accordion and recorder could combine, almost seductive in their disconcertion.

It was difficult not to raise a smile at the deafening bruitage of the free market in Vermutung über Hessen, share the sentiment though one might. Moreover, I wondered, during the lengthy instrumental prelude to the Heine setting, Heimkehr, where Henze sounded at his most Romantic, whether this was really where he had wanted to be all along, likewise in the post-Schoenbergian piano writing of Patria. What disconcerted most, however, was the conclusion, mesmerising purely on its own terms: Das Blumenfest. Was this an attempt at reconciliation? If so, it hardly seemed the place, for what is there to reconcile? I was put in mind of the young Boulez criticising such attempts in late Berg – though Berg, I think, had better reason to be doing so. The performances, however, were all excellent. Singers, players, and Ryan Wigglesworth showed apparently total commitment to Henze’s cause. If I had to single out a favourite, it would probably be Nicholas Allen’s role as master of ceremonies in the savaging of Coca-Cola America (The Electric Cop, ‘for Herbert Marcuse’): a sort of American culture-industry cabaret. The only irritant, and it really was an irritant, was that very small section of the audience, its ringleader a demonstrative man in a pink jumper, which insisted on applauding after every number.

There then followed a second film, again from Barrie Gavin, of a performance of the Requiem, its sequence of nine sacred concertos one of Henze’s finest achievements. The ensuing talk is best skated over. Suffice it to say, it opened with a declaration of lack of expertise in Henze and yet managed to inspire less as time went on. Given that the composer was apparently elsewhere in the building speaking for a radio interview, it seemed a great pity that we could not simply have heard that.

In any case, the evening concert made amends. The first section – there were two intervals – had Huw Watkins present a selection of Henze’s works for solo piano. One thing that struck me – as it had during some of Voices – was how Henze seems unable, or perhaps unwilling, to escape the shadow of Schoenberg when writing for the instrument. There are other voices too, of course, for instance the Scarbo-like opening of the Toccata mistica (1994), and the more Webern-like serialism of the 1948 Variations, but Schoenberg, whatever the ambivalence of Henze’s feelings towards him, never quite vanishes. I had not heard the Variations before and was most impressed: the form and style never seemed to constrict the young composer but acted rather as a spur to expression, Watkins ensuring strong characterisation. The youthful impetuosity of Cherubino (1980-1) was winningly portrayed, which then perhaps made the violence, apocalypticism even, of the 2003 Scorribanda pianistica all the more shocking. It is, for those who might be puzzled, a piano version by Martin Ketz of the Scorribanda sinfonica, and works very well in its new guise.

Fraternité was a ‘message for the millennium,’ as requested by Kurt Masur for the New York Philharmonic. (It remains unclear why it should then have been performed in 1999, more than a year too early, but never mind.) Certain progressions and melodic twists put me in mind of Busoni, though this may simply be coincidence. The post-Bergian orchestral writing is certainly consistent with much of Henze’s practice at the time and there even seemed to be a few hat-tips to Wagner. Kaleidoscopic colours reaffirmed Henze’s mastery of orchestration, but ultimately I do not think this amounted to much more than a postcard message: fine at the time, no doubt, but paling when heard by the side of the Fourth Symphony, an offshoot from the opera, König Hirsch. Here Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave as fine a performance as I can imagine it has received. Henze’s flight to Italy is celebrated, of course, but try as he might, he can only truly celebrate his new-found freedom in a German way. The forest inevitably conjures up visions of German Romanticism for him, from the opening horn-call (almost, but not quite, that for Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony) onwards. The four-movement-in-one structure again refers back to Schoenberg and, beyond him, to the Romantics. Joy expressed in the Mediterranean sun is very much of a Goethe-Mendelssohn tradition too – and all the better for it. Moreover, here, unlike Voices, such reconciliation as there might be does not sound forced or inappropriate; there is instead a lightness of touch, an almost Shakespearian fantasy, which would prove prophetic for a number of works that lay a long way in the future. If only some day we might hear König Hirsch itself…

The final work was Henze’s recent (2008) elegy for Fausto Moroni, Elogium musicum (in full: Elogium musicum amatissimi amici nunc remoti, ‘Musical Elegy for a most beloved Friend now Departed’). Once again, the BBC forces, now including the BBC Symphony Chorus, provided an exemplary performance. Having mentioned the persistence of Schoenberg above, I must do so again, for this almost seemed like a mini-Gurrelieder: weeping, anger, Nature, and finally something akin to apotheosis. Yet, despite the references in Franco Serpa’s Latin text to God, one knows that this remains as deeply pagan as the rest of Henze’s output. Whatever reconciliations he might attempt, some will surely remain several bridges too far. This was recognisably the world of Henze’s realisation of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria – which, as Sir Thomas Allen remarked in a recent interview, ‘You feel that the other versions, correct as they may be with the instruments of the day, you felt that they were coming out of the Vatican somehow. We were in Greece, in antiquity.’

Total Immersion: Stockhausen Day, 17 January 2009

Barbican Centre and Jerwood Hall, LSO St Luke’s

Tuning In (Omnibus film by Barrie Gavin, introduced by Barrie Gavin)
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Stockhausen – Adieu, for wind quintet
Stockhausen – Klavierstücke, nos. I-IV, VII, and IX
Stockhausen – Kontra-Punkte
Stockhausen – Choral
Stockhausen – Chöre für Doris
Stockhausen – Litanei 97

Nicolas Hodges (piano)
Emma Tring (soprano)
Guildhall New Music Ensemble
BBC Singers
Richard Baker (conductor)
David Hill (conductor)
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Stockhausen – Inori

Kathinka Pasveer (dancer-mime)
Alain Louafi (dancer-mime)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)
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Stockhausen – Hymnen


The first of three BBC Symphony Orchestra ‘Total Immersion’ days was devoted to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Last year’s Stockhausen Day at the Proms and the KLANG Festival at the Southbank would have provided an ideal context for many although, given the size of the ferociously hard-working composer’s œuvre, there remains much more music to be discovered. Barrie Gavin’s 1978 Omnibus film on the composer provided a stimulating appetiser, the director proving a diverting speaker in his introduction to this introduction. Centred around excerpts from a Songcircle performance of Stimmung and from Stockhausen’s fascinating lecture at the Oxford Union, it was sad to reflect – as Gavin did – that it would be inconceivable for such a film to be made today, let alone shown on BBC One. It might, he joked, just about make it onto a putative BBC Thirty-two at midnight. What most surprised me was how witty a speaker the composer proved to be. In my experience, his music, whatever its other virtues, is singularly lacking in humour; yet here, he was able to employ that very quality not for its own sake, not as a dubious means of acquiring popularity, but to grant insights into his music.

The first of the day’s three concerts was to my mind the most rewarding in ‘purely’ musical terms, the presence of some interesting but hardly representative juvenilia notwithstanding. LSO St Luke’s Jerwood Hall provided the setting, whilst the two evening concerts would take place in the Barbican Hall. Adieu (1966) was one of the few non-electronic works Stockhausen wrote during the 1960s, prompted by a request from the oboist Wilhelm Meyer for a memorial to his son, Wolfgang Christian. I had never heard the piece before but was instantly taken by how well Stockhausen wrote for wind quintet (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon). For a composer who was often most keen of all his contemporaries to forge ahead, apparently to sever links with tradition, there was a surprising degree of Mozartian reference or at least consonance, albeit with a typical fearlessness in creating something quite new. An opening cadence hinted at what was to come, sounding like a Mozartian objet trouvé, followed by mesmerising airborne material, which put me in mind of Ligeti’s Lontano. Such a pattern would continue throughout the piece, with a more ‘traditional’ gesture, always conducted, followed by freer, exploratory material, often of a similar nature to that mentioned, although one episode displayed considerable violence. Paul Griffiths’s helpful notes explained that the durations of events were given by the Fibonacci sequence (1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144) and that ordered increase, both in composition and in performance, was palpable: something more stratified, hierarchical even than, for instance, the fantasy of Boulezian proliferation. The ending, when it came, was charming, almost Classical. Richard Baker and members of the Guildhall New Music Ensemble proved excellent guides in this initial exploration.

Next were six of Stockhausen’s seminal Klavierstücke, expertly performed by Nicolas Hodges. I-IV were performed as a group, followed by V, then VII. It was a while since I had heard any of Stockhausen’s piano music in concert, the previous occasion having been a spellbinding recital by Maurizio Pollini, when, heard in the context of Brahms, Webern, and subsequently Beethoven, my ears had readily related Stockhausen’s music to German tradition. I suspected that this would be less the case in an all-Stockhausen concert but, for whatever reason, I was mistaken, probably a sign that this music is now truly taking its place in the repertoire but also surely a sign of the pianist’s genuine musical artistry. Written in 1952 and 1953, the first four pieces fit very well together; when performed in this way, as Griffiths noted, we can hear them almost as four brief sonata movements. I also thought of the single-movement/four movement duality of the Liszt B minor piano sonata or the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony no.1. The first piece displayed a gleaming, crystalline sound: neo-Bauhaus, if you like. Hodges’ performance drew attention to the crucial importance – as signalled by the composer himself – of the duration of pauses in relation to the serialised dynamic contrasts. Everything sounded – as indeed it is – both fantastical and absolutely logical. The same could be said for the other three pieces, the flowing, Andante-like second ‘movement’, the ‘scherzo’ of Webernesque concision, and the pointillistic ‘finale’, in which one could almost see the stars from which Stockhausen would soon draw such inspiration – and indeed descent. In the fifth piece (1954), some chords – which were most definitely heard as chords – could have come straight out of a set of Schoenberg Klavierstücke. Hodges imparted a true sense of continuity and seemed to refer back to the ‘cascade of gestures’ (Griffiths) that had characterised the first piece. Indeed, I heard the fifth almost as an expansion of the possibilities of the first, not least in the clearly audible demonstration of serialised dynamics as an integral part of composition, dynamic contrasts no longer being relegated to the realm of ‘expression’ of some higher-level material. The composer’s exploration of different registers of the piano, with different consequences for sustaining and ‘natural’ resonance was expertly projected here and in the seventh piece, although the latter certainly presented its own character, ‘personality’ even: more abrupt, more austere, yet spun with a similar musical line. There was violence too, all the more telling given that it followed such attention to detail in making every one of the repeated sounds different in its attack and dynamic projection. Intervals, pauses, and the relations between them were anything but hermetic abstractions. Stockhausen had a narrative to tell and Hodges told it. Something one often forgets – or perhaps never knew in the first place – about Stockhausen is that, whilst working in the Norwestdeutscher Rundfunk’s Studio for Electronic Music, he pursued doctoral studies in phonetics and communication theory, subsequently describing his supervisor, Werner Meyer-Eppler as the best teacher he ever had. Stockhausen may have been an intrepid explorer but always in the service of communication.

For Kontra-Punkte (1952, revised 1953), Baker and the Guildhall New Music Ensemble (here flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, piano, harp, violin, and ’cello) returned. Widely considered to be his ‘breakthrough piece’ – the composer himself made it ‘no.1’ in his cataloguing system – it has lost none of its lustre. It was most interesting to hear it with memories of Punkte, the piece ‘against’ which it is to some extent written, not yet faded from the Gürzenich Orchestra’s Proms performance last year (albeit in the last of the composer’s heavily revised versions). Baker and his players imparted not only a ‘technical’ musical sense of points giving way to groups – Stockhausen’s work is partly a commentary, intentional or otherwise, upon the progression of his own compositional technique – but also a poetic sense of how this might be understood as blossoming. I was impressed by the way in which each instrument retained, arguably acquired, its own character, again rather like a star in the night sky, whilst forming part of a greater constellation. There is another shift within the work, towards predominance of the piano part, somewhat helped by the similar tones of the harp, but largely the product of a Herculean effort on the part of the ensemble’s pianist. Here, Richard Uttley’s effort was not in vain, helping Baker to shape the dramatic trajectory of this wonderful work. No wonder that the notoriously demanding Boulez entertains no reservations about it.

The second half opened with the early Choral, from just two years earlier, 1950. It certainly does what it says on the tine, the line-by-line treatment standing in direct descent from Bach, albeit without any sense of compositional originality. David Hill shaped the BBC Singers’ mellifluous response to the text very well, including a telling pause between stanzas. I fancied that I heard something of another of Stockhausen’s teachers, Frank Martin, as I also did in the following Chöre für Doris, settings in translation of Verlaine, also from 1950. Three contrasting choruses, ‘Die Nachtigall’, ‘Armer junger Hirt’, and ‘Agnus Dei’, again displayed considerable aplomb in the handling of choral forces and again seemed singularly lacking in intimations of what was to come. I was, however, rather taken with the way in which different vocal parts displayed different vocal characters – in more senses than one – in the middle number, telling of a poor young shepherd and his love. The line, in which Verlaine, in Rilke’s translation, beseeches the Lamb of God to grant us peace, not war, was aptly imploring, both in composition and in performance.

Hodges then returned with the ninth of the Klavierstücke (1954-5, revised 1961). He was fully equal to the implacable opening with its long diminuendo of repeated and almost-repeated notes. Once heard, this cannot be forgotten, certainly not whilst the rest of the piece vainly attempts to break free of its oppressive shadow – not unlike the horrendous discord towards the end of the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony – and certainly not in this fine performance. Except, of course, it is not merely a memory, for it recurs, foreshortened and punctuated, until finally some provisional escape is attained. Once again, Hodges conveyed not only the musical but also the dramatic substance of Stockhausen’s vision.

Finally, we heard the extraordinary Litanei 97, Stockhausen’s 1997 reworking of ‘Litanei’, one of the ‘text compositions’ making up the 1968 Aus den sieben Tagen. Here the composer sets his original text, for speaking chorus and Japanese rin (bowl-shaped gongs from temple rituals, here struck by the conductor). This is ritual and difficult to judge in musical terms, but the spectacle, replete with blue and silver robes, was captivating. The singers formed a circle with the priestly conductor in the centre, the circle – later two concentric circles – sometimes rotating, eventually turning outwards and dispersing. Bells added both a haunting sound in themselves and a resonant punctuation. Members of the choir rather than the conductor intoned; I was not quite sure why this was the case, but it did no particular harm. There were two unfortunate interventions, one from a member of the audience in the balcony, who dropped a programme from on high, and the other from David Hill, who knocked over one of the bowls. It is, of course, easy to mock, but the question of the purpose of music in a modern, all-too-secular world is of crucial importance, and one Stockhausen, unlike so many others, was not afraid to address.

This nicely set the scene for the first of the evening performances, that of Inori (1973-4). Stockhausen’s decisive return to the ‘formula’-melodic method of composition, first broached in Mantra, was admirably described in David Robertson’s clear yet far from patronising spoken introduction. In these ‘adorations’, the basic elements of music – rhythm, dynamics, melody, harmony, and polyphony – are brought into being, one by one, each of the five sections devoted to one of the five sections of the composer’s generative formula. The mime-dancers, acting according to Stockhausen’s precise instructions, mirror – or do they lead? – the musical development and once again impart an undeniable sense of ritual to the unfolding proceedings. Certainly the basic, primæval opening aptly presented the ‘invocation’ of the work’s title. Oddly enough, the monotone G, pervading almost the entire work, is not ‘monotonous’ in the popular sense, although it proved impossible to shift it from my memory at the end of the performance. This is process music but not minimalism, as ultra-serialist as anything Stockhausen wrote during his Darmstadt years, both maddening and beguiling in its inexorable simplicity. Robertson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra could not, I suspect, have been bettered as advocates, understanding all of this perfectly. Their handling of the several crucial echoes was especially impressive, quite magical. It was unfortunate that, occasionally, the mime-dancers fell a little out of sync, a failing that drew attention away from the ritual. As the work became louder and the orchestra was given its head, there were sounds which, taken in isolation, would not have been totally out of place in Mahler, but context is all, or almost all. We were being led, visually as well as musically, towards an entrance into a mysterious temple. Applause was, I suppose, inevitable at the end, but I found the experience unsettling. Either this was a ritual of quite a different nature from conventional concert-going, in which case the reaction seemed inappropriate, or, given the supreme lack of irony, it was charlatanry, in which case...

But on to the final performance, returning to the mid-sixties for the internationalist tape-work, Hymnen (1966-7). There are actually two versions for musicians too, yet it was the ‘pure’ original we heard here. Hymnen is quite a testament to Stockhausen’s unique imagination, a montage of four ‘regions’ – I to IV, dedicated respectively to Boulez, Pousseur, Cage, and Berio – in which we hear various national anthems, shortwave radio signals, voices, crowds, aircraft, Stockhausen in discussion with his assistant, and so on, until finally reaching some sort of peace with the composer’s breathing. There is much that is of great interest – and, as ever with Stockhausen, it never seems that the concept is more important than the result. The distortions, intersections, and juxtapositions are genuinely compelling. Yet I could not help but wonder whether it needed to last two hours (one might answer, ‘but why should it not?); or, if it did, whether the Barbican Hall without lights was really the place for such a ‘performance’. No use was really made of the space, in sharp contrast, say, with the imaginative deployment of the Royal Albert Hall for last year’s British premiere of COSMIC PULSES. Yet in suggesting to us that a conventional concert hall may not really be an appropriate setting for his music, in disturbing our ideas about what a ‘concert’ might be, Stockhausen is doubtless performing a great service. That he is not merely doing that but is creating something utterly new elevates him from the merely Cageian.