Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

• Karlheinz Stockhausen: Havona
• Christian Wolz: Atropa-Bella-Donna

The world will never, unfortunately, receive a full performance of Stockhausen’s Klang; Stockhausen had completed 21 of the 24 component works when he died in 2007; Havona one of the last of these, and did not receive a performance until the beginning of the year. Nicholas Isherwood is well-known for his championing of both early and contemporary vocal music,, and performed the role of Lucifer in several of the operas from the Licht cycle. Klang is the thematic heir of Licht, both in its concern for providing music for the hours (as opposed to Licht’s days) and in drawing inspiration from the Urantia Book. According to Urantian cosmology, Havona is the last galaxy before Paradise, consisting of a billion planets. Stockhausen’s text takes the form of a ritual chant depicting the journey to Paradise, in the process also referring to other elements of Urantian theology, such as humans “black, white, green, yellow, red, brown and blue”, which Isherwood described in his pre-concert talk as a joke, but which is, in fact, key to a Urantian conception of evolution.

Havona is constructed from two elements; one is a double tone-row, the other is the lower elements of the electronic work Cosmic Pulses, also an hour of Klang, which forms  a backing track. Havona is split into 24 one minute sections, each of which has a section of music attached to it. The music for each section may be sung freely, the performer judges the lengths of notes and rests, as well as timbre and dynamics, although this must necessarily fit into the framework of Cosmic Pulses. Isherwood appeared to be concentrating largely upon the strength of his performance, singing with unwavering conviction. Combined with the costume of a white robe and orange scarf, this was an imposing performance.

If Stockhausen is always fascinating, Christian Wolz was certainly an unknown quantity. Wolz also used electronics in his performance – a largely understated backing track and electronic echoes, shifting quickly between his two microphones to produce slightly different sounds. Wolz’s oeuvre is semi-improvisational, using unfamiliar timbres. In particular, he has an interest in Middle Eastern singing and other unusual vibrato techniques, which he employed throughout Atropa-Bella-Donna. He describes the work as ‘”an acoustic performance in 3 stages”, but these are really undetectable, for in fact  it has far more divisions than this, switching to a different technique every minute and a half or so, an irritating feature which prevents the work from evolving beyond a too-long (50 minutes!) showcase of Wolz’s abilities. After half an hour, I was frustrated and exhausted. The other twenty minutes were fairly torturous. (To be fair, I was fairly tired beforehand; it would probably have been easier in a better state of mind, but this problem certainly didn’t exist for the Stockhausen – twenty four minutes felt like ten)