Out of this world | 11 July 2019

In Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI hands become fists, arms and elbows clubs, shoving, pounding and ker-pow-ing the keyboard to near oblivion. No wonder Pierre-Laurent Aimard had slipped on a pair of gloves before starting to stop his fingers from bruising or bleeding. The sound created is monstrous, alarming, thrilling. Aimard threw the full weight of his body behind each blow to such an extent that I could see his backside hovering above his stool. It’s not easy to beat up a Yamaha grand.

We always dismiss Stockhausen when he claimed that he came from the star Sirius. But his work backs him up. His Klavierstücke are exactly what you might expect from a dazed alien. The series is like a musical version of the Book of Genesis, each piece rebooting one fundamental element of composition. Let there be pitches scattered like stars, pronounces the first. Let there be registers and space, says the second. Chords! (No.3). Sexy chords! (No.4). Rhythm! (No.5). Five almost sounds like music. The first few are subatomic. From 5 on, things become multicellular; there are even hints of mangled narratives. By 11 things have built up to such complicated heights that the only way out is a cataclysmic Fall. Aimard dispatched this hour and a half of music with unbelievable energy.

Stockhausen was always at his best when not attempting to be an Earthling. But he was sometimes a victim of his own otherworldliness. Kontakte’s fusion of percussion, piano and electronics splashes and splats, bubbles and zings, zaps and zwangs. It must have boggled the ear in 1960. Now, alas, it sounds like Star Trek.

Mantra sees two pianists become eggy, crotales-dinging yogi, furiously competing over how to dissolve their pianos in an electronic soup. It works mainly because Stockhausen decides to harness the most futuristic technology of 1970 to make the two grands sound like jangly pub pianos.