Aimard et al.: Stockhausen, 1 and 2 June 2019

Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room

Klaverstücke I-XI; Kontakte

Stimmung

Für kommende Zeiten

Zyklus; Mantra

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Tamara Stefanovich (pianos)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Marco Stroppa (sound diffusion)

London Voices:

Laura Forbes L’Estrange (sopranos)

Clara Sanabras (mezzo-soprano)

Richard Eteson, Ben Parry (tenors)

Nicholas Garrett (bass)

Ian Dearden (sound projection)

Apartment House:

Simon Limbrick (percussion)

Philip Thomas (piano)
Kerry Yong (piano, keyboard)

Rhodri Davies (harp)

Anton Lukoszevieze (cello)

As Amsterdam celebrated ‘Aus Licht’, not quite the complete Licht premiere we still await, but a generous tasting from all seven operas, those of us unable to attend had to content ourselves with a Stockhausen weekend in London instead. It was certainly an intense couple of days, rewarding too, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard at its heart, just as he had been of the Stockhausen performances at last year’s Musikfest Berlin (three of them reviewed here and here).

I have purposely not re-read what I wrote then, though I shall have a look after posting. The enormity of Aimard’s achievement in the first eleven Klavierstücke, followed here by Kontakte (in a different programme in Berlin), was not diminished by a second hearing, quite the contrary. Indeed, a fundamental theme to everything heard here, in many ways a more diverse offering than in Berlin, was the crucial role played by performance in Stockhausen. Aimard’s ordering remained III, IV, II, I, V, VIII, VII, VI, XI, IX, X. Some people, I know, would have preferred the first four to have been played I-IV, but for me, the order of chronological writing worked well too. The third took its leave from Stockhausen and Webern, but starker, more northern (less Austrian?) Hard on its heels, the fourth initially yielded, almost as if a second subject, but quickly went on its own way: in the same line, yet different. Aimard’s gleaming Yamaha sound seemed ideal for the fusion of musical meaning and serial requirements that lies at the heart of the composer’s art – and thus at the performer’s too; for here was no doubting Aimard’s internalisation of this music, just as there would not be for Beethoven or Messiaen. The second piece sang and struggled, detail of duration and thus of meaning at its heart; the first proved frenetic, especially when not overtly so, in its post-Schoenbergian build-up. Time, then, for a little pause.

There was an intriguingly Boulezian éclat to the opening of the fifth piece, though its development – I think we can call it that, at a pinch – proved once again more overtly Germanic. Much the same might be said of its later chordal progress. The scale was, of course, quite different here from the shorter, earlier pieces; it was made not only to feel so, but necessarily so. An intensely dramatic eighth piece seemed, at least in retrospect, to prepare the way for the artistry with which, in the seventh, repeated pitch was ‘repeated’, or perhaps better, reinstated. (Such was how it felt, anyway.) It was as if this was the moment Stockhausen truly began to itch for the stage, even if it were that of a late Wagnerian ‘invisible theatre’. Aimard’s mastery of resonance already looked forward, fascinatingly, to the second and third concerts of what one would generally, quite rightly, think of as a very different Stockhausen. Then came the sixth, to which, again in retrospect, everything seemed to have been working towards. It sounded generative in a fashion both ‘traditional’ and anything but. How its silences told! How everything else did too, in all its combinations of parameters and their relationships. Monumental was the word for it.

There was opening éclat to the eleventh piece too. By now, there was little way one could not but listen to every note and its relationship to every other – or rather, at least think and feel that was what one was doing. Such was the way Stockhausen and Aimard had led us in. Were those strainings towards electronic sound? Perhaps it was fancy, but is that not too part of musical composition, performance, and listening? Likewise in the ninth piece, albeit in more chordal terms – yet still in terms of something greater. What was ‘old’, what was ‘new’? One asked, even if one could not answer. Finally, we heard the gloved scherzando of Klavierstück X, pyrotechnics and poetry as one: a Feux d’artifice for the atomic age. It was terrifying, thrilling, anything other than consoling. Sheer variety of sound, of voices, of music was very much the thing. And if the final phrase were not quite throwaway Haydn, nor was it quite not that.

For Kontakte, following an interval, Aimard returned (!) with Dirk Rothbrust (percussion) and Marco Stroppa (sound diffusion). Here, virtuosity was returned with interest: à 3, as it were. Theatre was more overt, in every sense, spatial performance and hearing to the fore from the outset. Precision, however, was every bit as crucial, as awe-inspiringly realised, as in the solo piano works. It was interesting to reflect, historically, on how twentieth-century percussion may have paved the way for electronics; such seemed to be part of the ‘moment’ here, at least. At one point, I almost fancied I heard helicopters about to take flight. Structure and its dynamic realisation in time, form, proved dizzyingly circular, yet not quite. This was music-making at its most open, in at least one sense.

Immediately afterwards, we moved from the Queen Elizabeth Hall to the Purcell Room for Stimmung. How one responds to a performance is perhaps an unusually personal thing. I, however, found this London Voices rendition especially involving, the drama heightened, verbal acuity to the fore. There was ritual, yes, but of an approachable kind, perhaps more akin to what we experience in general concert life, less ‘other’. Overtones did their work, but so did words (whatever one thinks of them). There were pros and cons to hearing this after the piano works and Kontakte; for me, on this occasion, the former outweighed the latter.

Likewise, after a good few hours’ break, for the following day’s Für kommende Zeiten. Here, the intuitive music that is not improvisation, the verbal scores that seem both to require reading and performance in just as emphatic a way as the Klavierstücke yet also not to do so, will perhaps always remain a mystery, at least to those of us listening rather than performing. The splendid performers of Apartment House, however, took us on a journey as fascinating, at many times as unexpected, as those to which many of us are more accustomed. We did not hear all seventeen pieces, but seven over about an hour and a quarter, ‘Intervall’, for piano duo (the only piece in which precise instrumentation is specified) proving quite the curtain-raiser, as our blindfolded pianists, Philip Thomas and Kerry Yong, acclimatised and gained their sight, in the process seemingly enabling our hearing to become listening. ‘Verlängerung’, ‘Zugvogel’, ‘Vorahnung’, ‘Japan’, ‘Anhalt’, ‘Spektren’, and ‘Schwingung’ followed. It is doubtless the height of Orientalism to say there were hints of an Orient that seemed to go beyond Orientalism, but such was our illusion.

For the final concert, we returned to the Queen Elizabeth Hall for Zyklus and Mantra. Rothbrust treated us to a mesmerising performance of the former, centre stage in every sense. Relationships again manifested themselves not only as points of interest but as the binding material of the music – if not just as in Beethoven, then in a way one might relate to his music, should one wish. Barriers between tuned and untuned percussion seemed to fall by the way. Here was a new orchestra: no gamelan, but Stockhausen’s own, Rothbrust’s own too. Such was the variegation of timbre and its implications, one could imagine never wanting to hear anything else. This was a cycle that was both just that and so much more.

Aimard returned for Mantra, with Stroppa and Tamara Stefanovich. I found myself making comparisons with Boulez’s second book of Structures, which I had heard – and seen – Aimard and Stefanovich perform in this same hall in 2011. Not that the works have very much in common; it was as much a visual-dramatic way in, and very soon more a contrast than a comparison. Two pianos, two pianists, then, played with bells, became bells and their masters. What was the relationship between acoustic and electronic, between work and performance, between instrument(s) and their performers? Such questions, such contests and collaborations, were part of the drama, but so too was an almost conventional battle royal heard at one point, Stockhausen’s often overlooked (German) sense of humour certainly given a fair hearing in this case. His music proved as obstinate as Beethoven and as strange to us as – well, life on Sirius. Aimard and Stefanovich afforded us as strong a sense of the whole as they might have done in Bach or Brahms; within that framework, there were in equal measure to be heard, felt, even thought, great subtlety and starkness. There was ritual, of course, but again not of an especially esoteric kind. There was no doubting either the composer’s voice or that of his performers. The sense of aftershock following the pianists’ howling proved almost Mahlerian. What did it mean? Who knows? Perhaps the question is as irrelevant as Stravinsky would have us believe, or as the ritual of later Stockhausen works such as Inori might suggest. The ensuing two-piano-plus toccata proved at least as mesmerising as Zyklus; and likewise changed the face of all that came thereafter. Form manifested itself in work, performance, and listening – even if, sometimes especially if, one could not put a name to it. There are, after all, many such mysteries in our world and beyond.

Prom 65: BBC SO/Bychkov - Ravel, Berio, and Stravinsky, 31 August 2018

Royal Albert Hall

Ravel: La Valse

Berio: Sinfonia

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

London Voices (chorus master: Ben Parry)

Ian Dearden, Sound Intermedia (sound projection)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

A richly allusive programme and performance, this. With any artwork – even, one might say, with anything at all – we all bring something different to it and take away something different too. With Berio in meta-mode, that becomes still more the case, in Sinfonia at least as much as in, say, La vera storia. (Will someone please, please stage that – or indeed any of the composer’s operas? The closest I have come was a wonderful performance of Laborintus II in Berlin from Simon Rattle et al.) Both La Valse and The Rite of Spring are quoted – allusively and/or elusively? – in Sinfonia, of course, but that is perhaps not really the point; or at least it was not for this particular listener on this particular occasion. I was led to think what ballet and opera might be or have been, what their relationships might be or have been, how they relate to the ‘symphony’ or sinfonia, and indeed to that thing, that practice, that whatever-and/or-however-we-want-to-think-of-and/or-experience-it we call ‘music’.

La Valse opened de profundis, as a companion to the yet-to-be-heard Rite: highly, ominously rhythmic, waltz fragments and later waltzes (?) themselves evolving. Much was seen, or rather heard – although somehow I fancied I saw things here too, in a ballet of the mind – as if through a kaleidoscope. The business of the senses, as of the mind, is messy, contradictory. Semyon Bychkov and the BBC Symphony Orchestra imparted unease as much through variegation of colour as rubato or harmony. There was often, not always, a mechanistic quality: paradoxical perhaps, given the apparent freedom of the waltz(ing), yet in keeping with the dialectics at work in the rest of the evening’s programme. Such, after all is this work, that conflict conveyed with disturbing magic in this performance.

The darkness of the opening chord of Sinfonia seemed, in context, to relate to the opening of La Valse. Voices entered, rendering – to use an appropriately Berian term – the music ‘lighter’ perhaps, or at least differently mysterious. Then they were off. Words from Claude L­évi-Strauss – I do not think we should say this is Lévi-Strauss him- or itself, or should we? – emerged, individual voices emerged: from the mass and vice versa. Words and sound, words’ relationship with sound, with instruments, and so on: all this and more was not just what we were led to think about; it was what we experienced. It was music. How ‘symphonic’ it was or should have been really depends entirely upon definitions: not an interesting game, really, save for the analytical philosopher – who, tellingly, will rarely have anything to tell us about music.

The name, the sound of Martin Luther King came together, like the musical forces as a whole, in the second movement. Points – however understood – of precision, of incision, not least from piano and brass seemed to gain meaning against the backdrop of a more mysterious ‘mass’, again however understood; and vice versa. Deconstruction was not only our lot, our necessity; it was our joy, our freedom, our music. Beguiling yet menacing, the wonderland of the third movement, like its Mahlerian bedding, asked us: what does this mean, where are we heading, perhaps even who cares? And of course, it told us: ‘keep going’. Interplay between voices and instruments, as well as their differentiation, seemed especially apparent in this performance. ‘Thank you, Mr Bychkov’: from which the fourth movement flowed, a tributary perhaps, or even a tribute, as if Mahler’s ‘O Röschen rot,’ yet not, emphatically not. This and the fifth movement sounded, as indeed the performance had increasingly, retrospectively as a whole, as if an instrumental, vocal, electronic madrigal reborn, both consciously and unconsciously. The opening to the latter, with its piano, flute, and soprano trio, seemed to incite a rejuvenation or better a reinvention of the work’s earlier musical worlds in both unity and dissolution.

Again in context, the multifarious woodwind lines of The Rite of Spring’s opening sounded as if a response to Berio. Wilder, I think, even now: testament to a performance that refused to treat this totemic work as a glossy ‘orchestral showpiece’. It was never, ever slick, constantly ratcheting the rhythmic and harmonic tension. Given Stravinsky’s method, ‘developed’ is probably the wrong word, yet Bychkov heard and projected it as a single, vivid narrative that yet gave space and voice to its individual scenes. Motivic insistence and transformation rightly did much of the work, grinding of ritualistic gears lacking nothing in force, willpower, and fatal inevitability, such affinities and conflicts readily evoking parallels in the previous two works on the programme. ‘The Sacrifice’ began as if a second act to a wordless opera; in a sense, it is: a new world or at least a new standpoint that only makes sense in reference to its predecessor. (Might one not say the same of movements of a symphony, or a sinfonia?) There was strangeness here that was anything but appliqué: no effort to be different, no effort to impress. Perhaps the challenge of playing the Rite today is actually to play it as music. Perhaps the same might also be said of the challenge of listening to it and indeed to any music.

Prom 26 - EUYO/Petrenko: Berio and Shostakovich, 5 August 2014

Royal Albert Hall

Berio – Sinfonia  

Shostakovich – Symphony no.4 in C minor, op.43

London Voices (chorus master: Ben Parry)

European Union Youth Orchestra

Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

Although far from perfect, the performance of Berio’s Sinfonia in the first half of this concert was certainly its high-point; indeed, I rather wish that I had left at the interval, given the tedium induced by Shostakovich’s interminable Fourth Symphony. Still, such was the programme Semyon Bychkov had been intended to conduct. Alas, illness had forced him to withdraw, to be replaced at short notice by Vasily Petrenko. Petrenko did a reasonable job in Berio; however, I could not help but wonder how often he had conducted the work before. It was certainly a swift, driven reading, but that seemed to reflect a head more than usually stuck in the score (understandable, given the circumstances).

 

The opening of the first movement was promising indeed: aethereal, its harmonies unmistakeably announcing an ‘Italian’ flavour – both Dallapiccola and Nono springing to mind – whatever the undoubted internationalism of Berio’s outlook. It is a great piece for the European Youth Orchestra, not only in terms of that ‘internationalism’ but also because, like Mahler (if only we could have had his music in the second half!) a large orchestra is employed, but sparingly, smaller ensembles drawn therefrom to wonderful, magical effect. It was a pity Petrenko drove so hard, but the movement recognisably remained itself. The second movement came across almost as a ‘traditional’ slow movement, albeit again with sparing, almost soloistic use of the orchestra. An appropriately geological and river-like sense characterised the third movement. Mahler’s Second Symphony was the bedrock, of course, but I was also fascinated by the thoughts of memory and its tricks that the Rosenkavalier references provoked. If anything, Strauss and Hofmannsthal proved the more resonant on this occasion, though whether that was simply a matter of my frame of mind, or was in some sense owed to the performance, I am not sure. At any rate, the combination – and conflict – between the EUYO and London Voices made it seem, especially in the context of Petrenko’s once-again driven tempo, almost as though one were trapped within a human mind, and a witty one at that. Mathieu van Bellen offered an excellent violin solo. The typically varied vocal references included one to ‘Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony’, concluding with a ‘Thank you, Mr Petrenko’. Amplification perhaps seemed a bit heavy in the fourth movement, though perhaps it was more a matter of the acoustic; nevertheless Berio’s imagination continued to shine through. I wondered whether the final movement might have smiled a little more – no such problem with the voices – but all was present and correct, and often rather more than that.

 

As for Shostakovich: well, his apologists hail this symphony as a masterpiece, but an opportunity to hear it had the rest of us wish it had remain ‘withdrawn’, not on account of any dangerous ‘modernism’ – Stalinist ‘socialist realism’ truly was insane! – but because it is such a dull, frankly un-symphonic work. For the most part, Petrenko and the EUYO did all they did to convince, although string playing sometimes went awry.  The first movement opened with Lady Macbeth-style Grand Guignol, perhaps more interesting than anything that followed. Precision and attack were impressive: there was a chilling mechanistic quality to the performance, but alas, the work ensured that returns diminished, Shostakovich’s threadbare invention rendered all too apparent after a while. The second movement is at least shorter, but from the outset, one felt, as so often with this composer, that one had heard it all before, and it still seemed too long. Oft-drawn comparisons with Mahler seemed as incomprehensible as ever. They made a little more sense in the final movement – so long as one bore in mind Boulez’s observation that Shostakovich offers at best a ‘second pressing’ in olive oil terms – but surely nothing justified the lack of variegation and indeed the sheer tedium of this piece. Petrenko and the orchestra rendered the movement’s Largo opening nicely creepy. Various woodwind took the opportunity to shine within the confines of generally unrelieved lugubriousness. There could, however, be no papering over the formal cracks. How I longed for a little invention: Haydn, Webern, Mahler, Berio,  just about anyone! Is it not about time that we abandoned puerile Cold War attitudes and considered whether this music is actually any good, rather than merely sympathising with the autobiography of an alleged ‘dissident’?

Mittwoch, Birmingham Opera Company, 25 August 2012

 

Greeted by a camel at the Argyle Works

Argyle Works, Birmingham

 

Kathinka Pasveer (sound projection: Wednesday Greeting, World Parliament, Michaelion, music direction)

Igor Kavulek (sound engineer)
BALANCE Audio-Media, Cologne (sound equipment)
Graham Vick (director)
Paul Brown (designs)
Giuseppe di Iorio (lighting)
Ron Howell (choreography)       
Sheelagh Barnard (technical director)
Richard Willacy (executive producer)

 

 

World Parliament

 

Representatives – Ex Cathedra (chorus master: Jeffery Skidmore)

President – Ben Thapa
Substitute President – Elizabeth Drury

Orchestra Finalists

Dan Bates (oboe), Jonathan Rees (cello), Vicky Wright (clarinet), Amy Harman (bassoon), Debs White (violin), Ian Foster (tuba), Karin de Fleyt (flute), Andrew Connington (trombone), Bridget Carey (viola), Bruce Nockles (trumpet), Jeremy Watt (double bass), Mark Smith (French horn), David Waring (percussion)

Helicopter String Quartet

Elysian Quartet (Emma Smith, Jennymay Logan (violins), Vincent Sipprell (viola), Laura Moody (cello)

Moderator – DJ Nihal
Ian Dearden (sound projection)
Miles Fletcher, Will Samuelson, Alistair Badman, Nigel Burton, Chris Holland, Peter Driver (pilots)

Michaelion

Delegates – London Voices (chorus director: Ben Parry)

Operator – Michael Leibendgut
Chloé l’Abbé (flute), Fie Schouten (basset horn), Marco Blauuw (trumpet), Stephen Menotti (trombone), Antonio Pérez Abelián (synthesiser)
Lucicamel – Marie-Louise Crawley, Nathan Lafayette

 

A 'cup of yellow'

The first performances of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch – the world premiere took place on Mittwoch 22 August, the composer’s birthday, whilst I attended the last of four performances on Samstag – could hardly have failed to be an ‘event’ of the highest order: the last of the Licht cycle, in duration roughly twice the length of Wagner’s Ring, to receive its first full performance, though it was the sixth of the seven days to be composed. These performances were, if possible, rendered all the more extraordinary by being given not by an established opera house and company, but by the heroic Birmingham Opera Company, founded by director, Graham Vick, as a community project, run from an office comprised of just three full-time workers in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. Productions are site-specific: ‘We don't have an opera house and we don't work in conventional theatres. We conjure our theatres out of spaces used for other purposes or maybe just abandoned. A brief period of illumination and then we move on – not tied to bricks and mortar.’  But then Stockhausen was hardly a conventional composer, let alone a conventional opera composer. The Argyle Works, a disused chemical factory, proved an excellent setting, not only in terms of its large, adaptable spaces, but also on account of a fine acoustic, doubtless testament to a great deal of expert preparation by sound engineers.

Despite its use of a 'super-formula', Mittwoch is not easy - certainly far less so than, say, Donnerstag, to consider as a unified work, especially in terms of narrative. Perhaps it would be more so as part of a complete cycle, perhaps not. But musically, the opening Greeting and Farewell, sound projection by the tireless Kathinka Pasveer, provide electronic material employed, if not throughout, then in two of the four intervening scenes, 'Orchestra Finalists' and 'Michaelion'. In a sense, it is up to the individual whether he should construct his own Mittwoch narrative, but in a sense, that is always the case: the situation, as so often with Stockhausen, is simply more extreme here. Mittwoch was first intended to be the only opera in which the cycle's three principal protagonists, for want of a better word than 'characters', (Eve, Lucifer, Michael) cooperate.As it happened, none of them actuallyt appears in straightforward fashion, though Eve and Lucifer are represented by 'emanations' (the latter in the bizarre form of 'Lucicamel' (German, Luzicamel), yes, a pantomime caamel), and the name of Michael is frequently invoked in apparent awe. Yet the idea of 'cooperation', related to the idea of 'love', remains: as Richarp Toop points out, 'almost uniquely in Stockhausen's work, this collaboration is political, in a parliamentary sense, in the inner ones, it is more specifically musical'. Even when it is political, it seems a hundred light-years, or whatever measurement Stockhausen would employ, from the political commitment of contemporaries such as Henze or Nono, let alone the younger Lachenmann. Stockhausen's (quasi?-)theological cosmogony remains the thing, for better and/or worse.

 

With ‘Wednesday Greeting’ (‘Mittwochs-Gruss), which originates from the electronic music of ‘Michaelion’ rather than the other way round, we were plunged into darkness, at least visually, whilst a four-track (quadraphonic) performance of music ‘very seldom reminiscent of this world and which awakens the universe of the fantasy’ (Stockhausen) unfolded. ‘Listening to music in the dark will become much more important in the future than it is today,’ Stockhausen wrote  in Electronic Art Music (2006), going on to say, ‘The main function of art music will be to make the souls of the listeners fly freely through the universes, with infinite new surprises.’ Whatever one thinks of that, the darkness certainly made one concentrate, and brought into relief choreographed moments – in a scenic rather than musical sense – that appeared all around us, just like the sounding of the music. Aspects of creation myths, old and new, flashed before our eyes, all superbly executed by a fine team of dancers. It is difficult not to respond favourably to the intense seriousness of Stockhausen’s vision, if, at the same time, it is difficult – at least for this viewer and listener – not to find an unintentional absurdity to it too. ‘Yellow is the colour’, apparently, so we left the first hall to progress to the ‘World Parliament’, passing an artist apparently pleasurably writhing in yellow paint that he poured over himself, perhaps the closest we came to conventional eroticism.

 

‘World Parliament’ (‘Welt-Parlament’) proved, apart from anything else, quite beautiful in an almost conventional a cappella choral sense. Praise could not be too high for the representatives, members of Ex Cathedra, conducted by the President, Ben Thapa. Love is the subject for debate, its meaning discussed in a manner that perhaps came easier to a child of the sixties than to many of us today. But even if sentiments, sometimes in invented tongues, sometimes in the vernacular, such as ‘Love resounds in your voice. Listen to your tone, to the sound of your voice, to GOD, because love must be in it,’ might be a little difficult to take for us, however beautifully sung by tenors joining forces, let alone the President’s ‘Positive thinking – that’s it!’, the ritual, choral and visual, was entrancing. Perched high on yellow stools, representatives with different world flags emblazoned upon their faces – I saw them in make-up when entering the factory – interacted, debated, apparently learned from each other. The substitute President, an ‘Eve emanation’, her coloratura wonderfully despatched by soprano Elizabeth Drury, takes office after a janitor called out the President on account of his car being towed away. Stockhausen admitted that he ‘very consciously made it that banal.’ Quite: perhaps it is a matter of that ‘German humour’ even we Teutonophiles find baffling in the extreme. However, it was the beauties of Stockhausen’s choral writing, apparently not entirely removed from some of his earliest works, that offered greater sustenance.

 

‘Orchestra Finalists’ (‘Orchester-Finalisten’) had us turn to the often staggering instrumental prowess of a fine group of musicians named above, octophonic electronic music following the progress of the instrumentalists. Again, Pavseer’s expertise here was crucial to the scene’s success. Suspended from the ceiling, splashing in a paddling pool, shouting, even, according to Stockhausen, ‘moving in an individual way and projecting their personal aura’, this extends ‘the way musicians publicly perform during music competitions’. You can say that again. In addition to the musicians’ antics, there was much else to divert the eye: dance, processional, including men in top hats with billowing smoke, a man with an aeroplane on his head...

 

The ‘Helicopter String Quartet’, premiered by the Ardittis but here performed by the Elysian Quartet, has become so notorious that it is difficult to know what to say about it. It is probably best to understand it as further evidence of Stockhausen’s extraordinary imagination, somehow both naïve and incredibly complex. As theatre it is quite a thing – and one should remember that Mittwoch is theatre, not ‘absolute’ music, whatever that might mean. Reports I had read were highly critical of Radio 1 DJ Nihal as Moderator. Perhaps anyone who was not Stockhausen himself would have come in for considerable criticism here. Yet the role is prescribed in the work and our Moderator offered at least one sound piece of advice, to try to listen to the music, that is, not simply to be wowed by the effect, relayed to us via four screens. That is difficult to do, but especially towards the end, I found myself increasingly able to listen to the notes, to hear the passing of notes, even lines, as well as the shouted numbers of the Lucifer formula, between the players, as well as hearing the interaction of instruments and helicopters. In the post-quartet discussion, the pilots acquitted themselves very well indeed, one of them (Nigel Burton, I think) revealing a gift for dry wit.

 

The final scene, 'Michaelion', perhaps brings us closer to something more operatic as generally understood, though we remain distant indeed from The Marriage of Figaro. Indeed, at times we seem closer to the world of Dr Who. The name 'Michaelion' makes reference to Constantine's fourth-century temple at Chalcedon in honour of the archangel Michael, but the 'World Parliament' has now turned intergalactic, with absurdity whose humour may or may not be intentional. Cosmological solidarity is summarised by the uniquely cooperative role played by Lucifer's 'emanation', Lucicamel, though passages such as the 'Shoe-Shine Serenade', the appearance of a huge bottle of champagne, and of course Lucicamel's defecation of seven planet-globes, paralleling the seven days of the week, tend to linger longer in the memory. Luca, who arises out of the camel, is appointed Operator, and responds to delegates' concerns in a short-wave form that harks back to 1960s works such as Kurzwellen. Once again, the choral singing, this time from London Voices, was beyond reproach, similarly Pasveer's sound projection and the expert instrumental playing, including a 'Bassetsu-Trio' for basset horn, trumpet, and trombone, symbolising Eve, Michael, and Lucifer, perhaps echoing in its way the eighteenth-century, Mozartian serenade 'entertainement', albeit this time for delegates. Emerging from this strange yet compelling tableau-cum-drama, we were offered a 'cup of yellow' to the strains of the electronic 'Wednesday Farewell' ('Mittwochs'Abschied').

 

 

 

 

An extraordinary experience, by any standards, for which all concerned, from Vick to the musicians and other artists, to the Arts Council, deserves a huge round of whatever passes for applause on Sirius. Now we need someone to stage Licht in its entirety.