Re-attuning the ears
In Germany, he is often referred to as “Professor Helmut Lachenmann.” He is 73, lanky, bearded. A scholar of Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, he is perchance the first representative of the second-generation European new wave.
His intellect ties ar with the old Frankfurt on the Main School and the cantankerous philosopher Theodor Adorno. His idiosyncratic music, which explores sound, is not, in The States, in fashion and is little known here. A rare holocene appearing by Lachenmann at an evenly rare computer programme of his grating, challenging, the-status-is-never-quo euphony in the Boastfully Orchard apple tree did not attract attending.
This week, Mon Evening Concerts devoted its evening to Lachenmann. Visiting Los Angeles for the number one clip, he was on hand as piano player. An ensemble of loretta Young musicians repeated its functioning of a major work from 1984 that made so few waves at its New House of York concert. Trey members of a second group, the Corps de ballet Recherche, flew in from Federal Republic of Germany to act actually difficult music written 20 years ago.
The concert was a sensation. Vacate seating area were hard to detect at the Colburn School's Zip fastener Concert Manor hall. A buzz was in the atmosphere. Members of the L.A. music elite, including composers from the academician and film worlds, were on helping hand. The audience stood and applauded lustily. More than at one time.
Lachenmann's situation is a curious unity. He stiff devoted to making music in fresh ways at a time when what is new is said to have become old. Many of his pet techniques -- the rasp of bows against the bridge of a fiddle or violoncello, the tapping on the tops of clarinets with their mouthpieces removed, the clicking of flute keys, the blowing of wind instruments into a pianissimo to spend a penny the strings resonate -- ar things the vanguard has been up to for decades.
What Lachenmann brings to the experimental table is a captivating sense of quest. He achieves an unusually sharp stress. He operates simply at the boundary of tradition. The result is music that sounds remarkably newly, that is quite mysterious however pronto engages the ear.
Monday's concert was an take a chance. It began with child steps. Lachenmann performed his early (1963) "Wiegenmusik" (Cradle Music), which feels more care fragments of sound than the real matter, as a prelude to "Ein Kinderspiel" (Child's Play), written as musical games for his children in 1980. For wholly his sincerity, Lachenmann has a terrific signified of fun. The English interlingual rendition of unity movement of "Child's Bet" is "Fake Chinese (slenderly drunk)." He obsesses on such nonsense as tripping down the scale or acquiring hung up on a repeated chord patch flirt with its demise resonances.
"Mouvement ( -- vor der Erstarrung)," or "Movement ( -- Ahead Paralysis)," was played by the Argento Chamber Ensemble conducted by Michel Galante. This was the work in 1984 that contributed to Lachenmann's international recognition as non just an earnest avant-gardist doing funny things to instruments merely a visionary wHO position totally those funny story things together with brilliant dramatic conviction.
The ensemble is a strange one: Clarinets, violins and pleximetry come in threes; flutes, trumpets, violas and cellos ar in pairs; the bass is the only bingle. Everyone does something unusual, and a sort of sonic jungle is evoked, the sounds resembling animals and nature communication in languages you don't see merely still realise ar languages.
"Allegro Sostenuto," which was the big ferment later interruption, is for clarinet, cello and pianoforte, and it received a gripping performance from Shizuyo Oka, Asa Akerberg and Jean-Pierre Collot. The composer describes the work as containing six sections that
