Karlheinz Stockhausen News
German composer
- piano, violin
- opera, electronic music, experimental music, serialism, aleatoric music, 20th-century classical music, chamber music, musique concrète
- Germany, Nazi Germany
- composer, musicologist, music teacher, music theorist, university teacher, musician
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2024-04-21
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2024-04-02 16:24:00
St Matthew Passion, Deutsche Oper, 29 March 2024
[…] engaging in a recreation of Bach for today, without ever suggesting they might prefer to be playing Wagner. Indeed, in their obbligato roles, one sensed a moment of musical liberation: how wonderful, it seemed, that for once they could not only play this repertoire, but engage in music theatre of their own. Likewise the massed choral forces, used sparingly together, but voicing drama and reflection from around us, evoking a great basilica as much as Stockhausen. All involved in their direction deserve credit, pastorally as well as musically, this mirroring work and production in practice. One can question some of the musical choices, but that will always be the case in such music; one can still learn from the choices made. I might not choose to use lutes for the continuo, but I greatly appreciated their contribution. Kieran Carrel proved an excellent Evangelist. It is at the best of […]
2024-03-26 04:09:41
This Week in Classical Music: March 25, 2024. Maurizio Pollini, one of the greatest pianists of the last half century, died two days ago, on March 23rd in Milan at the age of 82. His technique was phenomenal, even though he lost some of it in the last years of his life (he performed almost till the very end of his life and probably should’ve stopped earlier). His Chopin was exquisite (no wonder that he won the eponymous competition in 1960), as was the rest of the standard 19th-century piano repertoire, but he also was incomparable as the interpreter of the music of the Second Viennese School, and even more so as the performer of the contemporary music, much of it written by his friends: Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and many other. He will be sorely missed. Speaking of Pierre Boulez: his anniversary is this week as […]
2024-03-23 15:27:00
R.I.P. Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024)
[…] encore, one of four, to the five-concert ‘Pollini Project’ series at the Festival Hall, which took us literally from Bach to Boulez. A good number of them will be found on my blog in any case, under the Maurizio Pollini tag. There was the Bauhaus, crystalline surface-perfection of his recording of the op.25 Schoenberg Suite for piano, teeming with energy below, and the Orphic taming of the Furies in the Beethoven Fourth Concerto with Böhm. There were Stockhausen and Sciarrino, Schubert, and Schumann. I should at least mention the transition, or so it seemed, to a ‘late Pollini’, in which the technique was not quite so unwaveringly infallible as once it had been, though it certainly remained (until very late) present. Many felt a greater depth, almost as compensation. I know what they meant, but I think it was an illusion: the same old illusion that meant, dazzled and in some curious cases […]
2024-03-18 12:48:00
[…] of Wind Instruments sounded as seductive and rebarbative as ever, a perfect objet trouvé that find itself somehow chiselled to still further perfection. Apparently ossified lines suggestive of The Rite of Spring were imbued with radically new life, the performance as a whole splendidly alive: a liturgy in itself, to which we were permitted audience if not participation. If Boulez was an ideal interpreter (celebrant?) of this hieratic music, I could not help but think Stockhausen must have loved it too. At any rate, it made for a splendid introit to the Symphony of Psalms, whose similar strangeness registered visually in orchestral layout (famously, no violins and violas, nor clarinets) before a note had been heard. It proved another labyrinth, as full of incident in its way, above all in the first movement, as Mendelssohn’s Symphony. Glorious choral sound was well complemented by the orchestra; if there were occasions when […]
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