The suspicion that stereo recording is, for all its merits, somehow inadequate as a means of preserving late twentieth-century composition is confirmed nowhere more clearly than in the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. A full recording of Donnerstag (Thursday) from the opera cycle Licht was made available only a few years after the premiere in 1981, and for those of us not fortunate enough to be in Milan or London in the early-eighties, the only way to hear this dense, fascinating music was through one’s home Hi-Fi. Yet Stockhausen conceived of his music not simply as a series of notes and notational structures, but also in terms of the acoustic properties that governed the resulting sounds; he was conscious of music as an essentially spatial experience.
It became apparent from the opening moments of Michaels Reise - the instrumental second…
Comentarios