It's available from www.stockhausen.org for $20.

Many thanks, harmonyharmony!

Let us hope that the Amsterdam performance will become available too in the future!

That DVD isn't really a live performance as such though, given that the orchestra was played back from a recording.


It's all-important to anyone who is involved with studying or performing Stockhausen's music. Now go away and blather about rating composers somewhere else.

Pim, het is helemáál niet de moeite waard. Maar dat weet je zeker.

No one has had much to say about our musical and artistic point since our last message, so perhaps this will help. After a cursory inspection of the gentleman's trousers the absence of a sense of balance is at once evident. We mean to say, white under white is rather too much white is not it? What do Members think is he actually trying to tell us? The knife lying there looks so sinister too in its proximities. And that is before we even consider the fly buttons which are utterly out of control!


Thanks to Member Derks for his contribution; and a note to Member Harmony: we have been familiar with most of this man's works since his hey-day in the sixties and have already heard quite enough of them, for reasons which we have just now in part pointed out; but may we reassure him that we shall shortly have something very much more positive to say about Liszt in another thread.

Oh. Yes. Sorry, I don't know what came over me for a moment there.

The thing about witnessing a live performance of Inori is that the unity between stage layout, orchestration and musical structure is only really clear in those circumstances. It is a shame though that the music goes a bit pear-shaped towards the end and that (for me) the "transcendental moment" when the piece steps outside itself (the tuba solo and the dancers' ensuing actions) falls somewhat flat. Almost every KS piece has such a moment, of course, though many of them (the No theatre calls in Mantra, the famous "panning chord" in Gruppen, the chorus "applauding" in Momente...) come over much more forcefully.

Whoopee.

Here is what the admirable Mark Morris (a great authority on twentieth-century composers) says about the subject: "Momente emerges as academic, Hymnen and Opus 1970 become wearisome after the initial conceit is enjoyed, works such as Kurzwellen or Spiral must be much more fun to play than to listen to, and parts of Licht are stupefyingly boring."

Here is what sensible Norman Lebrecht says about the same Licht: "Even admirers describe it as an act of gigantic egomania, and it is impossible to foresee how Stockhausen can extricate his reputation from its arrant nonsensicality."

There speak two men of vast knowledge and sound judgement and we advise Members to note their words well as we find that they accurately express our own experience too. We especially like the phrase about "becoming wearisome after the initial conceit is enjoyed"; conceits have no place in true Art!