Excellent double-disc set of pieces from Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke, performed here by the Tokyo-born pianist and composer Miharu Ogura on Ogura Plays Stockhausen (THANATOSIS PRODUKTION THT22).
Besides the great playing, the crisp and vivid recordings (made at Kylingen in Stockholm at the Monopiano festival) and the very elegant packaging and presentation, the package includes a booklet of notes by Robin Maconie, the composer and writer who’s been consistently writing and publishing about Stockhausen’s work since 1972, up to and including the 2016 tome Other Planets: The Complete Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen 1950–2007. I’d be lost, frankly, without his useful booklet of notes here, which concisely describe the history and importance of these piano miniatures, the composer’s intentions, their effects on audiences in the 1950s (hint: they caused an uproar, even in Darmstadt), and includes touching snapshots in the life of the composer himself. For instance, I never knew that this most cerebral and sometimes-austere of modernists developed a taste for big band jazz during the second world war, and used to listen to it “in secret” on the radio in the middle of the night, nor that he even played jazz himself when he went on tour with Adrion, using his piano licks to “keep the audience in a good mood”.
Turn ye then to the prose of Maconie for very precise insights; I will highlight the two aspects of the music which Miharu Ogura executes and articulates flawlessly. The first is the jewel-like quality of the music: Maconie speaks of “elaborately cut baroque jewels”, a feature that’s arguably hard-wired into every note of the Klavierstücke, and it’s this hard, crystalline beauty that Ogura brings to the fore with her crisp, authoritative coups de doigts. You might say she’s almost engraving the music into the air, etching each note into place like an old-fashioned letterpress. The second achievement – well, I forget it already. I think it may have had something to do with the act of listening; I’ve always found Klavierstücke pretty tough going on the old lugs, and rarely play my copy of the 1985-86 recordings on WER 60135/36 (but they were played by Herbert Henck, and maybe the version by Aloys Kontarsky, known member of the Stockhausen Mafia, is the one I need). It could be that Miharu Ogura has succeeded in making this challenging music more listenable, more palatable; she may have found the key to turning the fragmented, disconnected syntax into sentences, prose statements, entire books. She may have absorbed one of the maestro’s dicta about “listening unintentionally”, as if we’re running into the music by chance at an unexpected locale rather than sitting down in the concert hall, ears dressed up in a tuxedo, in full expectation of an evening of high culture. Again, the above is partially cribbed from Maconie’s notes.
For further insights, glom a copy of this item, absorb the notes but above all prepare for an onslaught of austere genius, performed by this modern player who has been interpreting and playing the music of Stockhausen since she was 19. From 2nd March 2023; sadly this seems to be sold out at source.