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Thursday 4 December 2008

Whisper or scream

Robin Holloway attends the Spanish premiere of Helmut Lachenmann's Little Match Girl

Thus it is for the first 45 minutes or so. Then continuum begins to evolve — a long stretch of violent hyperactivity followed by prolonged near-silence, followed then by overlapping crescendi from all four banks of sound on the space’s four walls (an old thrill from Stockhausen’s three-orchestra Gruppen), here settling on a well-achieved major third. After this consonance, pitch is abandoned altogether for universal soft frotting of soft rubber (?) pads, prolonged build-down to the composer himself, slipping up on to the main stage from his seat in the audience, a gaunt, fine-looking oldish man, to recite in syllabically treated German the texts by Leonardo da Vinci and Gudrun Ensslin so incongrously affixed to the deconstructed Match Girl of Andersen’s tale.

Music (for want of a better word) ceases totally save for a distant whirr as of central heating, behind the long duration of the composer’s speech: it then resumes, chastened, so excessively soft that one sees rather than hears the slow bowing below the instruments’ bridge of the spatially separated violins. This ‘sound’ wasn’t even audible enough to be subliminal: it’s an ‘idea’ of sound rather than the corporeal actuality, however faint. Soon, though, the noisy explosions return (the composer had meanwhile retreated to his seat). The poor string players, at first unhearable against the surrounding silence, are now seen to be flailing away with equal futility against the savage onslaughts of noise acoustic and electronic, culminating in assault and battery from all three percussionists.

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