Helmut Lachenmann
Zwei Gefühle and Solo Works
Violin and viola players whisper over their instruments. A guitarist waits with the closest attention for the moment to make a gesture we might easily have missed. The tuba player rises to go over to the open piano, there to send sounds echoing into …
Schreiben
** In process of stocking ** If music’s relationship with reality is to be more than just a theoretical presumption, it cannot be limited merely to work titles, comments, dedications or quotations, but must also extend to permeate all musical dimensi…
Nun
Lachenmann seems to continue nurturing the modernist aesthetic,perhaps that it had passed/eclipsed the German experience, something Habermas has said, and that we do live in an age of new opacity, or complaisance (Undurchsichtlichkeit). It is fasc…
Complete String Quartets
'Gran Torso' (1972), 'Reigen seliger Geister' (1989), 'Grido' (2000-01). For the JACK Quartet. 'With a little help from my friends'. Once they called me their 'father.' But when with them I feel fifty years younger, and they are my admired brothers. …
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
Hardly any other composer has ever been as far removed from conservatism as Helmut Lachenmann. In all his oeuvre his listeners are never permitted to lean back comfortably even for a moment in expectation of the well-known and familiar. Again and aga…
Piano Music
Music as a message without words from far away – from our inner selves. Piano music as metaphor for the thrilling adventures of human existence.
Klaviermusik
The sovereign and immediate approach Lachenmann takes in his Fünf Variationen über ein Thema von F. Schubert (1956) lends Schubert's slight Deutsche Tanz D 643a special and almost heroic flavor. But only five years later, Lachenmann had already trave…
Ausklang / Tableau
The title Ausklang (Final Notes, or Fading Away) is intended to be understood literally. Lachenmann's Musik für Klavier und Or-chester is centrally concerned with final notes and sounds fading away. In particular, it is concerned with piano sounds cr…
Gran Torso / Salut für Caudwell
In 1988 the first issue of these recordings of Gran Torso and Salut für Caudwell was awarded the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics' Award); and neither compositions nor recordings have lost any of their value up to today.…
Allegro Sostenuto / Pression / Dal Niente / Intérieur I
Both Sostenuto and Dal niente were composed for the clarinetist Eduard Brunner. “As in the earlier Ausklang for piano and orchestra, the musical material is determined by the interplay of the experiences of resonance on the one hand and motion on the…
s/t
Sparse, minimal but sometimes heavy works from 1969-1978 by german composer Helmut Lachenmann (*1935), slow-motion instrumental breathing, plucking and string-scraping. Including the pieces 'Guero' for prepared piano (H. Lachenmann), 'Pression' for c…