Schwankungen Am Rand

Track Listings

1. Schwankungen Am Rand, for Orchestra

2. Mouvement ( -- vor der Erstarrung), for Ensemble

3. "...zwei Gefühle...," Musik mit Leonardo, for Two Speakers

Customer Reviews:

Live performances of early Lachenmann.......2003-11-16

This disc contains live performances of three of Helmut Lachenmann's earlier works--the world premieres of Interieur I and of Schwankungen am Rand, and a recent festival performance of the percussion concerto Air.

Interieur I (1966), for solo percussion, is the work Lachenmann now considers to be his Opus 1. For those who consider one percussion solo to be very much like another, this work probably will not change their mind--it is a well-crafted work but ultimately rather anonymous.

Schwankungen am Rand (1975), for orchestra, is often considered one of Lachenmann's most important works. I have always found it a little long, though the central section--where the percussionists 'play' on four thunder sheets, creating a huge variety of sounds from them--is quite extraordinary music. Good as this world premiere performance may be, it has to take a clear second place to the recent ECM recording, conducted by Peter Eotvos, which is faster, tighter, better controlled and in vastly superior sound.

Air (1969), for percussion and orchestra, one of Lachenmann's earliest mature works, is an interesting piece, the rumblings of the orchestra counterpointing the intricate sounds of the percussion part. The performance here, recorded at 1998's Ruckblick Moderne festival, is probably the best on the disc.

Overall, this disc is primarily valuable for the only available recording of Air. Interieur I cannot be regarded as a major work, and Eotvos' ECM recording--an outstanding disc overall--is to be preferred in Schwankungen am Rand.

Average customer rating:

a good place to start

A miracle.

An outstanding disc of music by a major contemporary figure

music revealed by deconstructing music

Schwankungen Am Rand

Manufacturer: Ecm Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B000066IDM
Release Date: 2002-11-05

Tracks:

Schwankungen Am Rand - Peter Eotvos
Mouvement (-Vor Der Erstarrung) Fur Ensemble - Ensemble Modern
'...Zwei Gefuhle...' Musik Mit Leonardo Fur Sprecher Und Ensemble - Ensemble Modern

Customer Reviews:

a good place to start.......2006-04-13

The obsession with timbre,attack,amplification etc.as opposed to pitch leaves me cold with some contemporary composers but Lachenmann is a special case:i'm often intrigued by the sounworlds he creates inspite of the fact that this isn't quite my kind of thing.There's no doubt about it,Lachennman is 100% sincere about what he does and the architectural sense is exemplary.Also,a glance at any of his scores will reveal just how painstaking this guy is at arriving at these results.

At times Lachenmann is akin to the last dessicated remains of western music,the final burning embers.A romantic image for the least romantic of composers and there's something terribly earnest about the spoken element in Musik mit Leonardo.Still,this is obviously the place to start if you've never heard any of his music.

A miracle........2005-12-09

Helmut Lachenmann is, nowadays, my favourite composer and the one I think has gone higher in the complexity of his works, a route that comes from the `60s and which Lachenmann explores time after time in the search of new technical possibilities of expression.

This CD is a clear example of how far he has gone and how wonderful his music is. Some of these works are composed under the crucial influence of Luigi Nono's `lessons' to Helmut Lachenmann, we have to remember that Lachenmann was the only `student' Nono had and that Nono asked Lachenmann for listening everything he could, exploring nature and human sounds. Lachenmann used to say that Nono even wanted he listen the sound of the grass growing, something very typical of Nono's late style, in the works that follows Fragmente-Stille, key fragments of the western music from Lachenmann took lot of learning for his works about the concept of `ascoltare' (=listening) which Nono worked so much. Mouvement or ...Zwei Gefühle, Musik mit Leonardo are clear example of this.

But first of all let me write about the players, the performers of this CD, whom make the miracle possible. The Ensemble Modern is, with no doubt, my favourite group of contemporany music and the one that has the highest technical level, together with a musicality really incredible and a great affinity with this modern scores. I could only think about other ensemble in this outstanding level, that is the Arditti Quartet. In fact, like that quartet, there are many works that are composed and thought to be played by them, like Helmut Lachenmann's last piece, `Concertini', which the Ensemble Modern has recorded for ECM too and which I hope be on CD next year 2006. I think about Mason's last work, which is composed too for the EM and which has been just released by Col legno. This very small ensemble, that has an orchestral version too (like we listen in that wonderful CD of Birtwistle in DG 20 21), is a virtuoso player in every instrument, joining together people who really feel and love the contemporany music. When other ensembles have to think about how to play a work, trying just to do it technically, the EM plays it in a incredible natural way and a completely `idiomatic' style of vanguard music. Apart from being very flexible and able to perform music so different like that by Zappa or Lachenmann, Ligeti or Reich, Nono or Nancarrow. Brasses, woodwinds, drums, strings... all of them are simply ¡perfect! in all the modern repertoire, specially in complex works like those you can listen in this CD.

I know Mouvement performed by the Klangforum Wien, a good recording but nothing compare to this recording, like Musik mit Leonardo, which I know by the Klangforum too and in the opera "Das Mädchen mit dem Schwöfelholzern".

Schwankungen am Rand was recorded in Col legno by Ernst Bour... when I listened this version I really thought it was a new work, the difference is the bigger I ever listened between two versions in any music, I think. This performance by the EM is ¡¡¡INCREDIBLE!!!, the only one in which the work shows all the amazing possibilities, one of my favourites in Lachenmann's early works.

As you cam imagine, this is one of my favourites CD of classical music of all time, so you shouldn't miss it if you really love modern music and Lachenmann's works specially.

An outstanding disc of music by a major contemporary figure.......2004-01-10

Helmut Lachenmann has been a major figure in the German new music scene for over three decades now, but it is only recently that he has become well-known outside German-speaking countries. (His influence within the German-speaking music world has been important and long-lasting, with major figures such as Wolfgang Rihm and Beat Furrer writing music that would have been inconceivable without Lachenmann's example.) The increased attention paid to Lachenmann's work has been matched by a regular flow of recordings, many from the Col Legno and Kairos labels, buth other companies have been getting in on the act, as in this superb ECM production featuring the Ensemble Modern and Ensemble Modern Orchestra under the direction of Peter Eötvös.

Lachenmann's mature music (anything written since approximately 1968) has been largely focused on the denying conventional expectations regarding the sound of instruments. His music uses extended techniques in great variety, both for the sheer joy in unconventional sound and also so that when conventional playing techniques are used, they strike the listener with the shock of the new. In the works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lachenmann explicitly attempted to avoid reference to music of the past, but since the clarinet concerto Accanto, his music has engaged with the concert tradition, at first entirely negatively, but latterly in a more ambivalent manner.

Schwankungen am Rand, written between 1974 and 1975, is probably the most extreme example of Lachenmann's aesthetic amongst the works on this disc. This orchestral score, lasting a little over 25 minutes, is largely made up of brief, fragmentary motifs that never quite seem to cohere. The remarkable central section of the work explores an enormous variety of sounds created using a group of thunder sheets (this is an explicit homage to Lachenmann's teacher Luigi Nono, whose use of the thunder sheet in his Diario Polacco I had so astonished the younger composer). This work is probably the most conventionally difficult listening on the disc, and I don't think it is completely successful, but the constantly changing variety of unconventional sounds remains intriguing throughout.

By the time of Mouvement (- vor der Erstarrung), a work for seventeen musicians, written in the early 1980s, Lachenmann's musical austerity had been somewhat softened by his ambivalent attitude to the music of the past. Accordingly, the sound of the ensemble here is somewhat more conventional (though extended techniques are still constantly in evidence) and the work even climaxes with a swaggering, over-the-top march that has more than a hint of tonality about it.

More hard-edged is zwei Gefühle, a 1992 setting of Leonardo da Vinci for two speakers and 22 players that was later incoporated into the composer's opera The Little Match Girl. The work opens with hard-edged, volcanic rumblings in the bass that match the uproar depicted in the text. A brief, fortissimo percussion figure accompanies a reduction in tension, though the work never settles down to anything that could be termed placid. The return of the percussion figure triggers an ambiguous conclusion to the work. Typical of Lachenmann is the atomisation of the text (which is treated syllabically and split between the two speakers, thus deliberately countering any hints of flowing narration); also typical are the fragmentary motifs that often seem on the brink of revelation without actually reaching it.

Lachenmann's music is not for everyone, but it has a lot to say, and his voice remains fresh and distinctive as the composer approaches his 70th year. This recording certainly should bring new converts to Lachenmann's distinctive sound world, as the performances of all three works on this disc are as good as any so far recorded. Recommended with enthusiasm.

music revealed by deconstructing music.......2003-06-30

Helmut Lachenmann recently came to my attention thanks to Paul Griffiths. He is mentioned briefly in MODERN MUSIC AND AFTER (1995 -- see my review), but not at enough length to make an impression. But then in November of 2001 (11/04/01), Griffiths wrote a long piece in the New York Times called "Making All Sounds Equal," reviewing several Lachenmann recordings and calling him "the most influential European composer of the moment." Incredible, given that Lachenmann will be 68 this year! Lachenmann studied with Nono in the late 1950s, and has been composing since the 1960s, but only now is he being recognized outside the German-speaking countries.

This ECM disc is the perfect introduction to an uncompromising avant-garde composer. "Schwankungen am Rand" ("Teetering on the Brink"), from 1974-5, is also the lead piece on Col Legno's Collage disc of Lachenmann. "Mouvement (-- vor der Erstarrung)," or "Movement Before Paralysis," from 1983-4, is featured on one of several Kairos discs of Lachenmann. And "...zwei Gefuhle..." ("Two Feelings -- for Leonardo"), from 1992, is incorporated in toto into the second half of Lachenmann's new non-opera DAS MADCHEN," "The Little Match Girl," also on Kairos. With all three of these major compositions, there is little doubt, then, that this ECM disc is the place to begin. The music is played by the Ensemble Modern, with Peter Eotvos conducting. Eotvos, a composer in his own right, was musical director of Pierre Boulez's Ensemble Intercontemporain (EI) at IRCAM from 1978 to 1991. The German Ensemble Modern, along with the EI, is one of only a few orchestral ensembles to specialize in contemporary works. The booklet includes an essay by Lachenmann on the composition of "Schwankungen am Rand," as well as an essay by Jurg Stenzl, both of which illuminate the music.

Superficially it might seem that Lachenmann has followed Cage into the realm of chance procedures. Actually Lachenmann's path is different, pursuing and constructing sounds, the physicality of the production of music, with great care -- nothing is left to chance. As you might imagine given that he began with Nono, Lachenmann sees his project as part of an effort to challenge the commodification of music -- a commitment to the ideals of Adorno. I realize I have only vaguely suggested what the music actually sounds like, and I think I'll leave it at that -- despite the apparent lack of a system such as serialism or stochastic methods, these compositions have a clear structural integrity -- order is reconstituted from the deconstructed parts of the "conventional orchestral engine."

It's interesting that the "late Nono" may have repaid his student by learning from him in turn in his compositions from the late 1970s on. And the recent JAGDEN UND FORMEN ("Hunts and Forms" -- see my review) by Wolfgang Rihm seems to me to be influenced by Lachenmann as well, specifically by his most often performed work "Mouvement," which concludes with a vigorous, rhythmic, tarantella-like passage. If everything so far has sounded dry and intellectual, it should be emphasized that there is a tremendous amount of humor in this music, just as there is in Beckett's writings. Rihm seems to have incorporated that as well.

In conclusion, let me echo Paul Griffiths and encourage you by all means to hear the music of Helmut Lachenmann!

Track Listings:

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1. Schwankungen Am Rand, for Orchestra
2. Mouvement ( -- vor der Erstarrung), for Ensemble
3. "...zwei Gefühle...," Musik mit Leonardo, for Two Speakers