So, Glanz (10th hour of KLANG, UK premiere) and Orchester-finalisten.

Glanz is a lovely and surprisingly relaxed piece of long-limbed chamber music for a Debussyish trio of clarinet, bassoon and viola, who stand around a lit object (in this performance a glowing green three-sided pyramid) in the centre of the stage. At one point an oboist appears at the back of the hall and dialogues with each member of the trio in turn, then with all three of them playing as one. Later, a brass duo (trumpet + trombone) emerge at the sides of the hall and engage in a similar spatial dialogue. Later still a tuba player ambles across the stage, playing along with the trio for a while before he wanders off again.

Despite the spatial elements, and the fact that the members of the central trio have words from the Latin doxology to speak towards the beginning and end of the piece ('Gloria in excelsis Deo ... et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis'), the music is for the most part an abstract and beautiful intertwining of contrapuntal strands. It's now clear to me that the material which I found so plain and banal in Harmonien must run through much of the KLANG cycle. Certainly a lot of each instrument's part in Glanz was using the same motifs, but somehow the intertwining of three lines and the extraordinary consonant, even quasi-tonal, harmonies on which they often converge made the whole thing considerably more interesting to my ears, even if I still find the use of the same basic 'formula' to provide rapid arabesque-like figuration to be a problematic aspect of Stockhausen's approach to pitch selection.

Orchester-finalisten I found to be a wonderful and captivatingly strange experience, but I'll try and come back to expand on that later. What I would say is that while it has a number of (possibly unintentionally) hilarious moments, they're almost all related to the visual rather than the sonic aspects of the piece. The sounds, both of the instrumental music and of the quite dense but varied electronic 'soundtrack' with which they interact, are extremely well composed, carefully considered and effective at all times.

This is good news.


IIRC it's a 24-tone series which uses the twelve chromatic pitches of two octaves.


This is even better news. I shall acquire the recording forthwith and give it another try. I hate there to be a Stockhausen piece I really don't like.