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An excellent survey of Lachemann's instrumental solos
This disc features members of the excellent ensemble recherche playing various solo works by the German composer Helmut Lachenmann that date from 1963, when he was still studying with Luigi Nono, to 1986, when he was consolidating his mature style. This style has been one of the more controversial ones in recent European art music: Lachenmann's mature music concentrates quite heavily on creating non-conventional sounds from conventional instruments (he has referred to this as a form of instrumental musique concrete). While not all of the works on this disc represent the mature Lachenmann style, three of them (Pression, Guero and Ein Kinderspiel) are the composer at his very best, and the disc also gives a good portrait of how he reached his mature style.

The earliest work on the disc is Wiegenmusik, a piano piece written in 1963. In some ways this four-minute work is a conventionally post-Webernian essay, yet ever so often strangely Messiaenic harmonies subvert the otherwise completely chromatic atmosphere. Moving on three years to the percussion solo, Interieur I, we find the composer more at home in extended structures (this work lasts over 16 minutes), though despite some imaginative writing here, I can't help but think that one percussion solo sounds very much the same as another.

By the time of Pression for solo cello, a 1969 piece, much of the mature Lachenmann style was in place. This work is a merciless anatomy of the means of production of cello sound (both in a literal and a marxist sense), where the normal playing style is almost never used, with the result that when conventional sounds do intrude, their effect is almost shocking. Pression has often been cited as an example of the negativity of Lachenmann's music; I think this is an incorrect reading--at least when performed live it is as funny as it is disturbing, and when played by a cellist with a sense for the drama of live performance, exhilarating.

Perhaps even more extreme than Pression is Guero, a brief piece for solo piano written the following year. In this work, the piano is treated entirely as a percussion instrument, with the keys never being struck in a manner that would sound a note. Instead, the pianist plays by running fingernails along the edges of the keys, striking the body of the piano, touching the strings with his fingers, kicking the pedals and so on--and, bizarrely enough, the results work very well in a musical sense. Certainly, after such a radical work, the same year's Dal niente (Interieur III) for solo clarinet strikes me as a disappointing stylistic retreat; while the quiet scurryings and hidden sounds certainly intrigue it has nothing of the radical energy of Pression or Guero.

Ein Kinderspiel moves on a further ten years, by which Lachenmann was very comfortable in his mature style. This is a seven-piece suite evoking a childlike joy in playing the piano--but not playing it conventionally. Hanschen Klein features the pianist bashing out two descending scales (whole-tone and chromatic) in an intentionally banal rhythm; Wolken im eisingen Mondlicht stays at the very top of the instrumental range playing pesante regular rhythms; Akiko gives the right hand white notes and the left hand the black ones. Falscher Chinese plays chords in contrary motion, starting from the center of the keyboard, while Filterschaukel pounds away at clusters, exploring the harmonic effects of the other strings resonating. Glockenturm contrasts the very top and bottom of the piano range, while Schattentanz plays a dance using just the top two keys of the keyboard and then modifies it through assorted pedal effects: at the close, the pianist stops pressing keys and the work ends with the sound of the pedal being pressed and released.

Toccatina, a 1986 work for solo violin, ends this disc. It explores near-silent sounds and extended techniques to create music that has nothing to do with a toccata. While a minor work, it is interesting in that many of the ideas here were to be developed more fully in Lachenmann's second quartet, Reigen seliger geister.

With the exception of the Toccatina, all the other works have appeared on disc in rival recordings; the advantage of this recording is of collecting the works together in very fine performances (I prefer Eduard Brunner on cpo for Dal niente, but the others strike me as first-choice recordings). This CD is out of print at the moment, so Lachenmann fans should snap it up if they see it second hand; if not, Montaigne have been reissuing many of their deleted recordings, and hopefully this one will return to the catalogue soon.