Track Listing

1. Gruppen, for 3 orchestras
2. Punkte, for orchestra

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28951 in Music
• Released on: 2006-05-22
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Dimensions: .18 pounds

Customer Reviews

exciting conversations for 3 orchestras!
I can only discuss "Gruppen", and do so because I know this piece well, and am displeased with 2 of the other reviews offered. Most of the latter I cannot make any sense of at all, and I will not make any pretense at doing so. This music is for the listener sitting before his Hi Fi, and not a mathematician, or an analyst trying to follow with a copy of the score. A roller coaster ride is enjoyable merely for the experience itself - the mathematics of the angles and bends and speed versus gradient etc are irrelevant to this entertainment. I enjoy "Gruppen" because it is a fascinating dialogue between groups or soloists of a large ensemble of musicians. There is one section, for instance, where a trombone and piano seem to be trying to imitate each other. It is exciting, playfull, humorous at times, colourfull, and the experience is on a grand scale! It doesn't seem to be trying to say anything; no moods and certainly no gloom and doom, and no pointless gaps of silence or meditation. It's just a wonderfull concert of orchestral chatter in which you cannot guess what's going to happen next. You don't have to have any special training to be able to enjoy this experience!

Classic 1950s Modernism played by an expert
To get to the point: (1) this is one of Stockhausen's best pieces; it influenced Boulez' own orchestral writing (in Pli selon pli and Figures/Doubles/Prismes, for instance), and was ripped off by Berio (in Tempo e Tempi, I think); it superimposes different tempi, as did Zeitmasse for wind quintet, although in much denser form (and is thus comparable to Carter's orchestral work from the Orchestra Variations onwards). Robin Maconie, author of the definitive book on Stockhausen, thinks "Gruppen" was influenced by the dense textures and spatial experiments of American orchestral music (Ives, Brant). (2) Peter Eotvos is a veteran who has been working with Stockhausen for at least 40 years or so (he was part of the Stockhausen Ensemble in the 1960s, together with Kontarsky, Johannes Fritsch, perhaps Christoph Caskel). (3) One of the reviewers is slightly wrong about "Punkte," which is an earlier piece (1952) than Gruppen (1955-57), not later (although it was revised in 1962). (4) There is another CD performance of this piece by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, but Eotvos is very worth having. (5) This music is indeed unjustly neglected, as reviewer notes. It may be hard going, but is also quite spectacular (as in the build-up to the climax, which comes fairly near the beginning, and is led up to with plucked strings and percussion from all three orchestras). The way the orchestras throw long held wind chords around the space points straight ahead to "Carre" and to parts of "Pli selon pli" (first movement, "Don"), as noted. You will rarely hear this live, since it requires many more rehearsal hours than anyone but a European state-subsidized orchestral can afford (i.e. the Suedwestfunk, once upon a time...).

old classic promordial filled with dust
you read Jean Baudrillard with his negativisms of the state of the "object" the neo-liberal order, corruption, hyperealizations, our obsessions with(misunderstood) history(s), scandels,mounting world debt and you might as well become anoymous,for as an individual subject where does this reality place one? you might simply forget everything, or virtually everything, and perhaps begin again.(If that is possible) So where does the post-war avant-garde fit into to all this new paradigm? where can important works be contemplated if at all, Should we merely forget such works even exist?
Adorno in his "Philosophy of Modern Music" came to place more empahsis on the "materials" of art, of composition rather than on on what a particular composer represented. The "materials" will tell you all you need to know, like "fragments" unearthed from your unconscious self.I suspect however Adorno's more Marxist strain,placed more relevance to what is real, the "materials" of music, rather than on what is said through theories and ideologies of movements.Adorno while teaching at Darmstadt in the Fifties, had said this avant-garde exhibited a sportslike quality to the products in churns out, the "for the first time" "novum",had a "libidinal charge" simply to do it because it was never done before, Certainly a dark work for three orchestras has its points of interests, so what do we simply forget it? or look at Stockhausen's incredible work(materials) in a new light?
Conductor Peter Eotvos certainly knows this music very well, he has conducted entire swabs of LICHT Stockhausen's 29 Hour mythical astrological romp-opera through the languages of modernity and the World Spirit. "Gruppen" however had much more modest objectives,gleaned from new perspectives of working in electronics; the three orchestras need three conductors, who rehearse by themselves to get the coordinated super-meta-rhythms Karlheinz has in the work. You have then a rhythmic and textural situations for modulations of these dimensions, fast slow transformations of pulse and pointillistic textures distributed over now a wide canvas surface of the orcehstra. You also have linear ideas and timbres that "travel" through and "above" the three orchestras; the stereophonic agendas at work;of "Gruppen" "Hot-Stuff" for the late Fifties.Today(for some) this is difficult music to experience,if incomprehensible, which is why this work will inhabit one of Baudrillard's "cultural warps""vuota""Voids" it demands much from the listener, the poor short-time span dyslexic listener of the current scene, who has been conditioned for short bursts of musical stimulants for contemplations, Give me a 3 minute piece anyday they will tell you, "Well worked out with melodies and harmonies I can sing" and where I can turn my brain off for the most part. Well I do not subscribe to this "breeze=easy" escapism.Or give me hours long pieces where I can simply "Fall-in" the work without much disruption to my listening sensibility.

After Baudrillard I think it is better first to study this work sitting down at a desk, look at the score, and see the complexities Stockhausen has constructed. I suspect you will get more from that experience than listening.Or perhaps just listen one time. This is the best recording of this work I have heard in quite some time. The old original DGG avant-garde series has Boulez and Maderna as conductors, you cannot find better hands than Eotvos. Also "Punkte" is a breathtaking work much later, but if you are students of orchestration both these works are well worth a flatter.Arthur Tamayo is also well-versed in these complex languages.