Karlheinz Stockhausen’s music evolved at high speed through the 1950s. His works of that tumultuous decade included three major orchestral scores, but only the first of them, Gruppen for three orchestras, is heard with any regularity now. Performances of its successors – Carré, for four instrumental groups and four choirs, and the spectacularly ambitious, quasi-theatrical Momente – are much rarer, and recordings of them rarer still. This is now the only easily available version of Carré; it’s taken from a concert at the Ruhrtriennale in 2016, and provides a reminder of how thrillingly original Stockhausen’s early works could be.
The four ensembles and attendant vocalists, all amplified and each with its own conductor, are arranged around the auditorium, so that the music of Carré rotates through the space, surrounding the audience, though that effect is flattened out in this recording. There are occasional outbursts of frantic activity, but the pace of the music is generally slow, and coloured by the mostly wordless vocalisations. It’s far removed from the minutely detailed, incident-packed world of Gruppen first performed two years earlier, and there are even moments in it which seem to look forward to the world of Stockhausen’s later 1960s works; not one of his greatest achievements perhaps, but still a striking work in its own right.
One of the four conductors for the Cologne premiere of Carré in 1960 was Mauricio Kagel, and his Chorbuch is its pairing here, in another performance from the triennale. It’s a collection of 21 Bach chorales, some sung exactly as composed, others recomposed by Kagel in a wide variety of styles, and three played in Bach’s own organ arrangements. It’s one of Kagel’s pieces that he categorised as “acoustic theology” – a commentary on Bach and an exploration of his own religious beliefs. Most will probably seek out this disc for its Stockhausen rarity, but Chorbuch is well worth hearing, too.
This week’s other pick
The Berlin-based label Bastille Musique, which concentrates on 20th- and 21st-century music, is now being distributed in the UK. Among its first batch of releases is a disc devoted to two symphonies by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, in tumultuous live recordings by the WDR Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Emilio Pomàrico. The Symphony in One Movement, composed in 1949, is early Zimmermann, an angry, angst-ridden work that had started life as a “symphonia apocalyptica”, while the Die Soldaten Vocal Symphony dates from 1963. Involving six soloists, it’s essentially a 40-minute distillation of the opera itself (which was finally staged two years later) that vividly captures the impossible ambition and visceral thrills of Zimmermann’s masterpiece.
