Stockhausen: Mikrophonie I; Kontakte etc CD review – fascinating percussion works, meticulously performed
By Andrew Clements, The Guardian
Originally published January 7, 2015; full text and original article visible here.
“One of the many narrative strands that weave their way through the history of 20th-century music is that of the emancipation of percussion instruments, a process that the composers of the post-1945 European avant garde continued very enthusiastically. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s early works for percussion, which Steven Schick and the members of his ensemble Red Fish Blue Fish perform so meticulously, include several milestone scores from the 50s and early 60s, some of them among Stockhausen’s finest achievements of that period. The Schlagtrio, for piano and two sets of timpani, composed in 1952, isn’t one of them, and now seems a rather dry, academic exercise in total serialism, especially alongside the pieces that came after it, but it was one of the earliest works that Stockhausen acknowledged in later life. And 1959’s Refrain, for piano, celesta and percussion – in which the score includes a short passage printed on a strip of Perspex which is rotated by the performers so that it occurs at different points in the otherwise rather reflective, passive textures – was one of Stockhausen’s explorations of how he might introduce a controlled element of chance into his music. Zyklus, from the same year and apparently the first ever piece for solo percussion, is effectively a virtuoso showpiece that comes printed on a spiral-bound score and may be begun and ended wherever the soloist chooses.
But it’s the great classic of early electronic music, Kontakte, completed in 1960 and performed here in the version for piano, percussion and pre-recorded tape, that sweeps all before it on the first of these two discs, sounding as majestic and boundlessly inventive as it ever has, while the real rarity is the first of the two Mikrophonie pieces that Stockhausen composed in the early 1960s. As far as I know, Mikrophonie I has only been recorded once before, in the 1960s, with Stockhausen himself supervising the two players who stroke, scratch and otherwise stimulate a giant tam-tam, and two more who manipulate the microphones and filters that project the resulting sounds. After the exuberance of the works that came before it, it’s a study in the extreme possibilities of using a single sound source, and the microscopic nuances of attack and texture that can result. Not the most instantly attractive of Stockhausen’s early works, perhaps, or the most vivid, but it’s still intensely fascinating, and as Schick and his colleagues show, it’s a piece than can produce effects of considerable grandeur and tingling suspense.
One of the many narrative strands that weave their way through the history of 20th-century music is that of the emancipation of percussion instruments, a process that the composers of the post-1945 European avant garde continued very enthusiastically. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s early works for percussion, which Steven Schick and the members of his ensemble Red Fish Blue Fish perform so meticulously, include several milestone scores from the 50s and early 60s, some of them among Stockhausen’s finest achievements of that period. The Schlagtrio, for piano and two sets of timpani, composed in 1952, isn’t one of them, and now seems a rather dry, academic exercise in total serialism, especially alongside the pieces that came after it, but it was one of the earliest works that Stockhausen acknowledged in later life. And 1959’s Refrain, for piano, celesta and percussion – in which the score includes a short passage printed on a strip of Perspex which is rotated by the performers so that it occurs at different points in the otherwise rather reflective, passive textures – was one of Stockhausen’s explorations of how he might introduce a controlled element of chance into his music. Zyklus, from the same year and apparently the first ever piece for solo percussion, is effectively a virtuoso showpiece that comes printed on a spiral-bound score and may be begun and ended wherever the soloist chooses.
But it’s the great classic of early electronic music, Kontakte, completed in 1960 and performed here in the version for piano, percussion and pre-recorded tape, that sweeps all before it on the first of these two discs, sounding as majestic and boundlessly inventive as it ever has, while the real rarity is the first of the two Mikrophonie pieces that Stockhausen composed in the early 1960s. As far as I know, Mikrophonie I has only been recorded once before, in the 1960s, with Stockhausen himself supervising the two players who stroke, scratch and otherwise stimulate a giant tam-tam, and two more who manipulate the microphones and filters that project the resulting sounds. After the exuberance of the works that came before it, it’s a study in the extreme possibilities of using a single sound source, and the microscopic nuances of attack and texture that can result. Not the most instantly attractive of Stockhausen’s early works, perhaps, or the most vivid, but it’s still intensely fascinating, and as Schick and his colleagues show, it’s a piece than can produce effects of considerable grandeur and tingling suspense.”
