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2023-08-30 09:54:00
Salzburg Festival (7) - The Greek Passion, 22 August 2023
[…] rejected by a stern, unbending, mendaciously ‘Christian’ society, shown for what it is by the ostracism and death of one of its own for showing proper Christian charity, has a multiplicity of resonances today. It surely follows on well in the wake of Nono’s Intolleranza, which Covid had me miss.Performances were generally very good, often excellent. Maxime Pascal, known primarily for more overtly modernist music, a complete cycle of Stockhausen’s LICHT underway with his ensemble Le Balcon, could hardly have offered more committed advocacy at the helm of the Vienna Philharmonic. A wild, often bewildering, variety of musical styles was vividly characterised. Playing was sharp, warm, weighty, delicate, and so much more, as required. Choruses were equally impressive, hymnal and more violent confrontation of two great masses of human beings brought to equally vivid aural life. Sebastian Kohlhepp gave a powerful, vulnerable portrayal of Manolios, the shepherd given the role of […]
2019-05-22 20:07:00
Visionary Stockhausen Donnerstag : Royal Festival Hall
Event of the Year - Karlheinz Stockhausen Donnerstag, at the Royal Festival Hall with the London Sinfonietta (Maxime Pasdcal, conductor) fully staged by Le Balcon. Those lucky enough to have been there will never forget ! Stockausen is so visionary that it's almost impossible to constrain his work. Hence the importance of approaching it as sensory experience, so it operates on the mind and imagination. In Stockhausen's Licht ideas of Music as Light and Enlightenment are presented as mega saga, shaped in the context of cosmic struggle. Donnerstag was the first opera written in the series, so it's an ideal introduction to the saga and to Stockhausen's work as a whole. There's no need to grasp it in its entirety : listeners are participants in a continuing creative process. To be human, as Stockausen implies, is to be sensitive and open minded. Donnerstag starts even before the audience enter […]
2019-05-22 11:38:35
Royal Festival Hall, London Symbolism, stagecraft and tap-dancing trombones combine in Le Balcon’s impressive production of “Thursday”, the first in Stockhausen’s epic opera cycle ‘That is the meaning of Donnerstag aus Licht.” The translation came up on the screen four hours into this performance, not long after a tap-dancing trombonist had been vanquished in a duel. What – had we missed something? Hardly. Stockhausen didn’t weave such a wide, dense net of symbolism, with everyday mundanity next to Age-of-Aquarius-style talk of “cosmic co-creators”, only to tell us what it is about. At least one of Donnerstag’s subjects is clear:
2018-12-30 14:52:00
Performances of the Year, 2018
Anniversaries too often prove a lazy way to programme. Sometimes, though, especially in the case of composers in need of rediscovery, they afford excellent opportunities. Such has been in the case of Karlheinz Stockhausen, latterly overlooked in favour of other post-war avant gardists. His ninetieth birthday has brought forth a number of outstanding performances. (One excellent thing about Stockhausen’s music in performance is the consistently high quality of performance. Either you can do it well, it seems, or you do not do it at all.) A standing rebuke to those who would fashionably claim that the later Stockhausen, the Stockhausen of the Licht operas, had gone off the boil – usually one discovers that they do not even know the later music – was provided by Paris’s Opéra Comique and Le Balcon, in a truly unforgettable staging of Donnerstag. Two concerts in particular from this year’s Musikfest Berlin had the composer […]
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