Stockhausen: »Gruppen« / Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra
Hamburg International Music Festival
Bringing the music festival’s Stockhausen focus to a close, audiences have an opportunity to experience »Gruppen« live, one of the composer’s greatest masterpieces. As part of this performance, the 109-strong orchestra – in this case the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra – is split into three groups, each with its own conductor and playing independently of each other on three separate stages around the audience. And yet, thanks to the chords that roam to and fro, there emerges a large, unified tonal space, one created collectively by all three groups, making even the great orchestral works by Gustav Mahler or Richard Strauss look old. This amazing spectacle has already been performed in sports halls and aircraft hangars, but the half-hour piece is now performed in the large concert hall at the Mehr! Theater am Großmarkt – and that twice in succession, with a chance to change seats during the interval.
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a great utopian, hence the decision to devote an extensive retrospective to him at the Hamburg International Music Festival. As head of the studio for electronic music at West German Radio (WDR), he used early forms of the synthesizer to create an entire cosmos of thitherto-unprecedented sounds, advancing into new musical dimensions in the process. His works breathe the rhythm of the stars, and get lost in the spiral nebulas of infinity.
»If we tax our mind to the utmost and arrive at the limits of what can be analysed and described, that’s where mysticism begins. That’s my home as a musician, that’s where I want to go.«
Towards the end, the eccentric esoteric even claimed that he was from the planet Sirius. Notwithstanding, Stockhausen was the best-known and most important post-war German composer, influencing artists as diverse as the Beatles, Björk, Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, Amon Düül, Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk and Frank Zappa. Stockhausen believed firmly in a higher plane of human existence, and he believed that music was the key to it. It’s worth following him on this path: the utopia of music lives on.
Performers
Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien
conductor Cornelius Meister
conductor Duncan Ward
conductor Dietger Holm
Programme
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Gruppen für drei Orchester