Enemy of the expected: Helmut Lachenmann
Photo: Br/Astrid Ackermann
“If you walk over a meadow and step onto a snail, you have practically ruined a existence. There is a very small pianissimo crack that you hear. ”You can understand this quote from the composer Helmut Lachenmann as a plea for a kind of light listening-the redistribution of hearing, which is even sensitive to the smallest noises. The conductor Vladimir Jurowski, in his short introduction to the concert with works with works by Lachmann and Schostakovich at the music festival Berlin, picked up on the actor Denzel Washington, who, as ex-agent Robert McCall in “The Equalizer 2”, says “there are two types of pain in this world: pain that blows, and the change that changes.”
Between these two poles, the work of almost 90-year-old Helmut Lachenmann can be located, whose works are a focus of this year’s Musikfest Berlin. Lachenmann is considered the founder of a “Musique Concrète instrumental”, ie a “sound production in which the instrument is explored and exhausted as a sound body down to its most secret noise” (Guido Fischer). He creates a miracle world of the noises. He does not give anything about listening expectations and habits, on the contrary, he provokes the status quo of the “classic” music production and revolts against all self -sufficient in retracted comfort zones.
Lachenmann’s compositional attitude is subversive, and not least can be traced back to his teacher and friend Luigi Nono, from which he acquired a clear awareness of the historical relevance and the importance of musical material “as well as” a critical reflection of political history and present “(Jörn Peter Hiekel).
The performance of “Affection”, the “concert music for piano and orchestra” created in 1984/85, by the phenomenal pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra (RSB) under Jurowski came to a climax of the entire festival. “Function” is a monster of a work, for the pianist, for the orchestra, for the audience, not least due to its performance duration of about 50 minutes – but a happy monster. A composition full of boldness and thirst for adventure, demanding, disturbing and stimulating (in a way that may have experienced the audience of the premiere of Beethoven’s »Eroica«, so with a certain overwhelming one).
“Helmut Lachenmann brings into the music what is going on outside in the world,” writes Steffen Georgi in the program. With all the shimmering sounds, with the tender tones of the piano, which can no longer be changed and gradually “fade away” in the hall, and with the huge punch instrument apparatus from, among other things, four pedaled, two Bongos, six Japanese temple gongs, four tampams, four Chinese basin, 16 Woodblocks, three small drums, six TomToms, three metal blocks and two thunderboles, mostly instruments with indefinite pitches, for whose operation eight drummer is required, Lachenmann creates a “fortissimo of the emotional effect”, as he himself notices. The listeners are banned in time and space, there is no longer any outside, only the inside of Lachenmann’s sound and noise cosmos. A “sound house” is created, as Francis Bacon called this utopian place 400 years ago in “Neu-Atlantis”. Or “Free Music in A Capitalist Society” – that again Iggy Pop said.
With countless, mostly only tiny gestures, the islands of sound and sounds are generated, be it in the piano, be it through the floating sounds of the wind instruments in the middle part if the musicians only bubbles in their instruments and produce wind noise; “Wind” is the name of the wind instruments in English. With single tones and clusters, with sound repetitions and quickly thrown, quasi fragmentary figures, with short Scharf movements of the strings and a number of piano glisandi, the composer designs a “music with pictures”, as the work in the subtitle is called.
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“The title” End “sounds relatively poetic,” says Lachenmann. “But I meant it technically. A piano actually only plays exits. That means that the tones disappear again and again. And this element can be reorganized, develop, develop. “To a” sound noise “, the lachen man who prefers the term” noise “towards” noise “for his music, a wonderful experience.
A week earlier, the ensemble, fortunately, listed a regular at the music festival, under the direction of one of the conductors of the new music, Sylvain Cambreling, Lachenmann’s »Concertini« (2005), which the composer for Just this ensemble wrote. “Concertini” can be understood as a kind of opus sum of Lachenmann’s employment with the entire “aesthetic apparatus” and the musical vocabulary of bourgeois music. Lachenmann, a father figure of contemporary composing, turns out again as a master of the scraped and the croaky tones; He calls “Concertini” a “Scharr concert”.
“Concertini”, that is, literally translated: several small concerti, and in fact, every instrument is treated as in a soloist concert, with unusual playing techniques that demand the highest virtuosity. In this work, in addition to “noisy” and alienated, Lachenmann also takes “the unadorned, familiar, in the broadest sense consonant” with the aim of “all sounding and sounding in such a changed context” (Lachenmann is also an excellent author and music theorist).
The composer remains faithful to the subversive handling of common expectations-which the new music police are very bad. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, for example, in 2009 in “Concertini” neither a “content-aesthetic idea” nor a “conception” can recognize. In the past, Lachenmann always considered the German representatives of an aesthetics of the resistant, Mahnkopf sees in “Concertini” only a “perfectionist” and “without risk” music that can be “heard at a tasty”, “almost as if it were Richard Strauss” (and in fact a listener at the Merchandising stand in the foyer claims that “ending” the “alpine inforon”).
Sylvain Cambreling and the Ensemble Modern go to it with their encore when it comes to the provocation of the new music police: they perform the orchestral version of the “Marche Fatale”, a tasty-rich parade piece, “a carelessly daring escapade”, a “small stylistic stray on the occasion”, as Lachenmann notes, a silly-minded one Catchy tune. Lachenmann’s “musical fun”, to a certain extent, in the sense that “Marche Fatale” is “no composition”: “To say it with Ravel about his” Bolero “: It” contains no music “. A casual sin. “
And if you think of the first part of the concert with current works by Lisa Streich, the most popular Klamaupümelei combines with boring pseudo -drovocations, then the listeners of Lachenmann’s enjoyable, counterpoint -picked Kehraus have earned. The old master shows the boy again what a rake is.
The latest orchestra work in Lachenmann’s HR Symphony Orchestra finally lists Frankfurt under the impressive direction of Matthias Hermann: the “Music for 8 Hörner and Orchestra”, which was revised in 2023, entitled “My Melodies”. “It’s not about new sounds, it’s about hearing new things,” the composer noted. “But to put the antennas on this energy of listening, I first had to suspend the melody.” Whoever expects melodies from “My Melody” is on the wrong path. “You convey” My Way of Melodies “in creative handling of the sounding means.” And: “I always insist on my music. The concept of the “cheerful” includes all aspects of the serious. ›Cheerful‹ is not ›fun‹; ›Cheerful‹ is not ›strange‹. ›Cheerful‹, that can be very deep and complex, «said Lachenmann 2018 in an interview with» My Melodies «.
The eight horns sit around the conductor in the center of the action, but they are not soloists, but almost a single homogeneous and at the same time complex instrument. This also stands contrary to this as an instrument, then back into its individual parts disassembled orchestra, which in no way only serves to accompany the horns. Again and again individual “melodies” emerge from nothing, flutter through the room, pass. Long passages only consist of the common, toneless breathing of the wind instruments – the music, the “melodies” breathe in the room. That is of tremendous tenderness.
After all, too, there are no virtuosos, solo self -portrayals in the “cadence”, “but primarily an energetic sound field, knitted from scale -like runs that bundle into chaotic wave movements” (Dirk Wieschollek in the program). A breathtaking music of the breath.
It was wonderful to experience Helmut Lachenmann how he was personally present in all performances of his works in the Philharmonie. A stroke of luck of the music festival to present this cross -section of Lachenmann’s works. And it was nice to see what excellent and absolutely worthy-worthy sound body the local broadcasters operate, whether the RSB or the HR symphony orchestra, and with what intensity and competence these ensembles take on such complicated works.
“The rest is – think,” says Helmut Lachenmann.
The HR symphony orchestra concert can still be found on the Berlin Festival homepage until October 17th accessed become. The music festival takes place until September 23.
www.berlinerfestspiele.de
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