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.
