Wien Modern (5) - Hodges/Widmann/ORF SO/Cambreling - Mundry, Andre, and Saunders, 19 November 2015

Grosser Saal, Konzerthaus, Vienna

Isabel Mundry – Non-Places, a Piano Concerto (2012, Austrian premiere)

Mark Andre - … hij … 1 (2010, Austrian premiere)
Rebecca Saunders – Still (2011)

Nicolas Hodges (piano)

Carolin Widmann (violin)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Sylvain Cambreling (conductor)

 

Another Wien Modern concert in which women composers outnumbered men. We are getting there, it seems – I hesitate to say that we are ‘there’, wherever that might be – with respect to New Music, although there is a long way to go in honouring female composers of the past. (Barbara Strozzi is a current cause of mine; I am sure most of you will have others. And there are, of course, real problems in other respects.) Part of the answer, to many problems, is of course to have a far healthier balance between contemporary musical production and outings from the museum. Festivals such as Wien Modern help enormously, and the turn out for this concert was very encouraging; but every orchestra, every hall, every musician, every audience member should think about the bizarrely narrow ‘repertoire’ that suffocates us.

Isabel Mundry’s Non-Places, a Piano Concerto, drew me in, although I really felt that I needed at least another hearing to grasp where it had taken me. (That is a criticism of me, rather than of the work, I hasten to add; I should certainly like to have another opportunity.) Untuned percussion leads us to orchestral chatter – passages, I learned later, from Oswald Egger – and laughter. Such unexpected sounds, alternating, combining, mutually transforming, certainly had me sit up and listen (and watch!) Various orchestral instruments sound amongst the chatter. It is actually quite a while until the piano enters, almost as if we were hearing a conventional opening ritornello. When the piano does enter, it is not in obviously soloistic fashion; indeed, the work progresses more as a chamber or ensemble piece than what we might have learned to expect from a piano concerto. It is clearly a challenging work for all concerned, but Nicolas Hodges, the ORF SO, and Sylvain Cambreling all did an excellent job. The pianist’s despatch of, for instance, repeated notes, a repeated device in different yet clearly related guises, was everything one might hope for. Moods vary, as do textures. I was especially captivated by duetting between plucked piano strings and cimbalom: a visual as well as an aural spectacle. Other instruments, whether percussion or strings, act as the changing orchestra alongside the two apparent soloists. There was in work and performance very much a sense of a varied yet single span.

 

I am afraid I could not make much of Mark Andre’s  … hij … 1. I admit that I am becoming a little impatient with works in which instrumentalists ‘play’ but make no sound; it certainly has an element of theatre to it, and here, at least, sounds occasionally emerge from the silence, but it is a device that has quickly become clichéd. Alas, most of what I heard fell under the heading of cliché. Although doubtless very well performed – there is no doubting the prowess of this orchestra, nor its commitment – ultimately, it sounded a bit like a minimalist attempting to ape Lachenmann (and not getting very far). There are some nice touches, for instance percussion emerging out of what I suppose we must call the ‘extended techniques’ of not playing or barely playing. Likewise, I felt that rhythm emerged from that opening too. I could not discern, though, why the orchestra – or rather piano and wind – suddenly start playing ‘normally’, nor why they stop. Sudden shifts, whether of tempo or instrumentation, do not seem to signify anything in particular. It felt, I am sad to say, interminable.

That could certainly not be said of Rebecca Saunders’s Still, for which the ever-outstanding Carolin Widmann joined the orchestra. (I learned afterwards that the piece is dedicated to her, and that it was premiered by Widmann and Cambreling, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.) Still came as a relief, from the very opening violin solo, which somehow imparted a sense of a work and performance that knew exactly where they were going, even if we did not (yet). In many ways, it sounded more like a traditional concertante piece than Mundry’s work. The orchestra engages with the soloist, and vice versa, such interaction continuing, echoing, contrasting; that held for the performance as well as the work. One aspect of the writing that especially caught my ear was the timbral transformation of particular pitches, inevitably bringing, even so many years hence, Webern to mind. Widmann’s rendition of the solo part had me wondering what it would be to hear her in Bach or Schoenberg; indeed, there is something pre- or (slightly) post-Romantic to a role one might call obbligato. (I thought at times of Schoenberg’s op.47 Phantasy for violin and piano.) There was true emotional as well as intellectual depth here. Despite the increasing value – if indeed in such post-modern times we are permitted to speak of æsthetic worth – awarded performance art, installations, and the like, this seemed triumphantly to underline the ongoing importance of the musical work, whether as concept or, perhaps more importantly, as experience.

Hodges - Debussy, Birtwistle, and Mozart-Busoni, 14 September 2014

Wigmore Hall

Debussy – Etudes, Book I

Birtwistle – Variations from the Golden Mountains (world premiere)

Mozart-Busoni – Giga, bolero, e variazione

Birtwistle – Gigue Machine

Debussy – Etudes, Book I

Nicolas Hodges (piano)

 

This was a fascinatingly programmed recital, which proved to be more than the sum of its considerable parts. Debussy’s Etudes bookended two Birtwistle works, both splendidly original and full of ‘traditional’ resonance, with Busoni reimagining Mozart (partly, like Birtwistle, reimagining Bach) at the centre. Nicolas Hodges’s interpretations played to and upon the programming, drawing out – and enabling the listener to draw out – connections, rather than presenting ready-made ‘individual’ performances. And, of course, there was the small matter of a Birtwistle premiere in his eightieth birthday year.

 

The first six Debussy pieces opened with a stark, elemental ‘pour les “cinq doigts”’, its simplicity almost aggressive. Uncertainty invaded, preparing a typical dialectic between opposing yet related tendencies. There was great clarity to Hodges’s performance; this was forthright, even high modernist, Debussy. ‘Pour les tierces’ put the interval in question in the foreground from the outset, permitting elaboration, variation, something akin to discussion. Harmonies, if some way still from the non-functional, were readily apparent as constructions from intervallic material: an obvious contrast with, say, many of the composer’s Préludes. Such was not, of course, always the case; indeed, contest was in good part the thing. The importance of intervals, at any rate, reminded one that Webern was far from the only begetter of Boulez and the post-war avant garde. And then, the third study seemed to take in more of the world of those far-from-superseded Préludes: Debussy – and a good performer – will always question, even confound. Mediæval resonances of the fourth, organum in particular, made their point without a hint of the archaic. In ‘pour les octaves’, Post-Lisztian pyrotechnics combined with modernistic insistence, even at times, glare, seemingly born of the first study, whilst ‘pour les huit doigts’ seemed to take its leave from that first piece’s dexterous explorations: post-Czerny, as it were, though with Liszt not so far away either.

 

Birtwistle’s Variations from the Golden Mountain – ‘I’ve been listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations a lot recently; I thought it was obvious.’ – received its first performance, commissioned by the Wigmore Hall, with the support of André Hoffmann. It was inevitable, doubtless, but still striking how much the ear found, and was led to find, points of connection with Debussy at perhaps his most ‘abstract’. A generally and, for the composer, unusually slow tempo, following a toccata-like opening flourish, made no difference to the typical yet typically unique senses of mechanism and of its progress and halting. Perhaps that tempo, as well as the instrument, enabled more of a post-Webern pointillistic impression than one often gains from Birtwistle, at least at times. Stockhausen occasionally came to mind in that respect too. There was always, though, a longer, melancholic line, as well as typical outbursts of almost Schoenbergian (op.11) violence, Hodges drawing out mightily impressive sonority from the bass of his instrument.

 

The second half opened with Busoni’s reworking of Mozart’s extraordinary Schoenbergian Gigue, KV 574 and the fandango – which, for some reason, Busoni dubbed a bolero – from the third-act finale to The Marriage of Figaro. The first gigue section was taken very fast indeed, anything but ‘Romantic’; indeed, it emerged as very much in keeping with what we had heard in the first half. The ‘bolero’ offered relative, but only relative, relaxation, still very much in constructivist, even Bauhaus, mode: most intriguingly so in its Klemperer-on-speed Sachlichkeit. The final ‘variation’ of the gigue material offered an ambiguous, ambivalent response to some of the Lisztian tendencies announced by Debussy. It seemed all over in a flash, leaving one wishing for more – not unreasonably so, in the case of the ever-neglected Busoni.

 

The 2011 Gigue Machine is, according to the composer, a ‘fantasia in two parts’, its counterpoint ‘linear and sonorous against something else that is very staccato’. To my ears, it sounded, both as work and performance, closer to Stravinsky than Variations from the Golden Mountain, but also in context drew upon the example of Mozart’s – and Mozart-Busoni’s – Gigue as well as Bach. Harmonies, again probably partly as a well-nigh unavoidable consequence of pianistic tradition, sometimes suggested German music from Bach to Schoenberg. And of course, there were the wonderful, machine-like ostinatos so typical and, again, so individual in their reinvention.

 

Then came the remaining six Debussy Etudes. The seventh sounded as a whirlwind, within which a diatonic heart was permitted, encouraged, or enabled to beat. ‘Pour les agréments’ was, quite properly, more yielding, even charming. Debussy’s famed ambiguity came to the fore once again, though there was nothing remotely fuzzy to Hodges’s pianism. Virtuosity was still required – and received. Likewise in ‘pour les notes répétées’, though I wondered whether we might have heard more at the softer end of the dynamic range. Musical process was at any rate abundantly clear and meaningful. The sphinx-like Debussy came once again before our ears in ‘pour les sonorités opposées’, wonder on show at the exploration of harmonies – and pianistic harmonies at that. Ghosts of Tristan occasionally made themselves heard, but so did premonitions of so much of what was to come later in the twentieth century. A note of whimsy was struck in the eleventh study, albeit underpinned by something wordlessly deeper. Beguiling tone and a willingness always to yield were crucial here. ‘Pour les accords’ was duly climactic, Debussy’s knowingly cruel demands seeming very much to form as well the material as well as to bind apparently disparate earlier tendencies together. As an encore, and with a nod to Birtwistle’s initial intention to call Gigue Machine ‘Bunch of Bagatelles’, we heard Beethoven’s op.126 no.3, structure and apparent simplicity very much to the fore, without precluding sentiment or fantasy.

 

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.

 

Hodges/Dierstein/Watts/Maxwell/Tunstall - Birtwistle, 9 January 2013

Hall One, Kings Place

Saraband: The King’s Farewell (2001)

Ostinato with Melody (2000)
Orpheus Elegies (2003-4): Elegies 1, 3, 4, 14, 6, 10, 15, 13, 12, 21, 22, 25, 9, 16, 20, 19
Gigue Machine (2011)
The Axe Manual (2000)

Nicolas Hodges (piano)

Christian Dierstein (percussion)

Andrew Watts (counter-tenor)

Melinda Maxwell (oboe)

Helen Tunstall (harp)

 

 

Kings Place is at the moment showing portraits by Adam Birtwistle. His father, meanwhile, was the focus of an excellent concert downstairs in Hall One. First up were two solo piano pieces, Saraband: The King’s Farewell, and Ostinato with Melody. The performances by Nicolas Hodges revealed a good deal that they had in common, of which the perhaps surprisingly post-Schoenbergian harmony was certainly not least. Onward tread and audible musical process were equally to the fore. The latter piece, written for Boulez’s seventy-fifth birthday – I remember the 2000 concert very well – seemed to present a dialectic between certainty and uncertainty, both principles simultaneously immanent. Birtwistle’s stopping and starting proved mechanical in the very best, highly characteristic sense.

 

Sixteen of the twenty-six Orpheus Elegies, for voice, oboe, and harp, followed. The composer says that they may be performed in any order, provided that number one be performed first, and number nineteen last. What I think of as Birtwistle’s realised archaism – both more real and more archaic than any ‘reconstruction’ – was hauntingly present from the outset. The adjective ‘elegiac’, if verging on the tautological here, really did seem the mot juste, though there is great variation between the elegies, each of which takes a line or sometimes an entire sonnet from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. (How many fine musical works that poet has inspired!) For instance, the opening of no.4 offered a hint of the scherzando following its two predecessors, without disruption to the overarching sound- and dramatical world. Some elegies employ voice; some are merely identified by a line printed in the score. All three musicians, Andrew Watts, Melinda Maxwell, and Helen Tunstall, communicated their parts and the whole with hieratic vividness, the ‘reine Übersteigung’ (not ‘Übersteibing’, as the programme had it), the pure transcendence of Rilke’s first sonnet approached and verging upon instantiation. Watts also had to operate a couple of metronomes in two of the purely instrumental movements, adding after a fashion to Birtwistle’s ritual. The composer’s exploration of expressive capabilities of all three instruments, counter-tenor included, proved as searching and as successful as anyone might expect.

 

Gigue Machine for solo piano sounded every bit the gigue, every bit the machine. Again, it was Schoenberg – as well, of course as Birtwistle – who sprang to mind, the Baroque reimaginings of the op.25 Suite reinvented, consciously or otherwise. Mechanical intricacy was the order of the day, both in work and Hodges’s fine performance. Joined by percussionist Christian Dierstein, the pianist proved just as much at home, as did his partner, in an exhilarating account of The Axe Manual. Changing roles and weighting intrigued, percussion seemingly first ‘shadowing’ piano, and then vice versa, though of course it was never quite so straightforward as that; there were always ghosts, and ever-changing ghosts at that, in this machine and its manual. Drums offered a different relationship with piano from that explored with tuned percussion. The piano as an instrument showed itself both invariant and infinitely varied, echoing the certain/uncertain dialectic we had heard in the contemporaneous Ostinato with Melody. Instruments likewise merged and yet remained distinct. Rhythm of course was very much a guiding principle, both to work and performance, but far from the only one; Birtwistle’s melodic gift is every inch as remarkable, every inch as obstinately, bloody-mindedly ‘English’. Yet there has never been anything remotely insular about this country’s greatest composer since Purcell; shades of Stravinsky (Les Noces) and Boulez (Le Marteau and, I think, sur Incises) just as apparent and yet just as transformed as ‘Englishness’ or the distant yet present ‘archaic’.        

 

A post-concert discussion was notable primarily for the ease with which, once again, Birtwistle demolished the uncertain, meandering questioning of a certain, well-nigh ubiquitous journalist. The Minotaur now beckons at Covent Garden.

 

 

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.

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.