Andrew Porter's review of Composer Portraits appeared in the TLS on March 10 2000.

COMPOSER PORTRAITS
Luciano Berio, Hans-Werner Henze and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Royal Festival Hall and Radio 3

Radio 3 and the BBC Symphony Orchestra devoted three February concerts to three composers who were young heroes of the 1950s, are now in their seventies, and still active. Luciano Berio was born in 1925, Hans-Werner Henze in 1926, and Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1928. In the post-war decade all three were, as Paul Griffiths noted in a programme essay, “pushing towards a new music, fit for a new age of peace, co-operation, and social justice”. In the spirit of Beethoven and Wagner they pursued that noble end. Their ways diverged. Berio increasingly embraced and transformed music of the past into sounds reformed and reconstructed to disturb and delight modern ears. Henze added traditional musical beguilement to his modernism. Stockhausen embarked on the seven-day visionary opera Light, still in progress. All three composers have had operas prominently performed at Covent Garden: Henze’s We Come to the River, a Royal Opera commission, in 1976; Stockahusen’s Thursday in 1985; Berio’s Re in ascolta in 1989.

The three concerts, in the Festival Hall, were well attended. Those of my age (I’m Stockhausen’s contemporary) relived excitements of long ago, when as young men the three of them – Boulez, too, but his seventy-fifth birthday is having its separate celebration – stood on the shoulders of Debussy, Stravinsky and Webern to push music forward. I remembered my first sight of Stockhausen, a young man with eyes agleam, in the sweltering Cologne studio where we gathered late at night to hear music more radical than the official fare of the ISCM Festival; Henze as a golden boy (“If I were gay”, Stravinsky said, “I’d want you as my lover”) in rapturous music reliving every good German’s romance with the land where the lemon trees bloom. But the Festival Hall also drew a young audience eager to hear and see the Old Masters. The pre-concert talks that each of them gave were thronged.

The big work on the Berio programme was Coro (1976), his fifty-minute, polyglot assemblage of folk utterances, newly composed, shot through with the Neruda refrain “Come and see the blood in the streets”. Berio writes “exemplary” works – a symphony called Sinfonia, an opera called Opera, a concerto called Concerto, a recital called Recital – as if to answer the question “What does a symphony / opera / concerto / recital mean to an audience today?” In Coro, he evokes a worldwide chorus of people in song, sounding their joys and their fears, but he ends:

You will ask me why this poem
doesn’t speak of dreams, of leaves,
of the great volcanoes of my native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
The concert was given in days when Pinochet’s fate was being debated.

The composer himself conducted. At its London (1977) and New York (1980) premieres, the expert Cologne Radio Chorus was imported to sing Coro. This time, the forty soloists of the BBC Singers, each paired with an instrumental soloist, gave a radiant, inspired performance. Berio has likened his score to the plan of a huge imaginary city, musical images inscribed like graffiti on its harmonic walls. The virtuoso Chemins VII (saxophone, Claude Delangle) and Sequenza XII (solo bassoon, Pascal Gallois) completed the bill.

An unaccompanied choral piece, Orpheus Behind the Wire (1983), was at the heart of the Henze concert. The six choral songs are a parergon to Henze’s full-length Orpheus ballet, with a libretto by Edward Bond, exploring, as does the ballet (also Kurt Weill’s Der neue Orpheus), the musician’s role in contemporary society. Henze scores with a wonderful ear for textures, sonorities, lapped lines, close-pressed harmonies that cloud and clear – sudden swirls of melisma, drumbeats over drones, a blazing climax. Again the BBC Singers, conducted now by Stefan Parkman, were stunningly sure. Earlier Henze was represented by Ariosi (1963), five voluptuous, melancholy Tasso settings with twining soprano and solo violin – originally Irmgard Seefried and her husband Wolfgang Schneiderhan, here Carole Farley and Ernst Kovacic. The Fifth (1962) and the Eighth (1993) of Henze’s ten (so far) symphonies, conducted by Oliver Knussen, completed the bill. Both are attractive pieces. The Fifth is unwontedly compact. The Eighth, Midsummer Night’s Dream-based (Puck’s journey for first movement, a valse grotesque for Bottom and Titania as the second), is not without episodes of the old near-reckless abundance.

Stockhausen was represented by the pioneering three-orchestra work Gruppen (1957), performed twice, with Andrew Davis, Martyn Brabbins, and Pascal Rophe as the conductors while the composer sat at a sound-console. Ten of his Piano Pieces, nearly an hour’s worth, completed the programme. Gruppen may have been engendered by experiment and theory – an exploration of rhythm and pitch as related forms of periodicity – but fantasy and creative genius brought it to birth; Robin Maconie in his Stockhausen book writes of “impressions and reflections of natural movements, leaves disturbed by wind, patterns of rainfall, sunlight dancing on the waves”. The spatial devices first conceived as a practical way of superimposing metres and tempi too intricate for a single orchestra to compass became an exciting (and influential) part of the piece. The Festival Hall is not its ideal home:

Rattle and the Birmingham Orchestra showed that four years ago, when they played it on consecutive days in Birmingham and in London. And both Gruppen and Coro have flowered more freely at the Proms (in 1967 and 1977). But these were three exciting, important concerts. Perhaps there will be Albert Hall repeats this summer.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now