WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln - Péter Eötvös / Arturo Tamayo / Jacques Mercier

Editor's Info:
In mid-1957 the Hungarian composer Gyrgy Kurtg, then at the very start of his career, arrived in Cologne. He missed the premiere of Stockhausens Gruppen fr 3 Orchester by a few months, but when Stockhausen played him a tape of the work, he was utterly astounded. Later, he said if Dostoevsky once said that Russian literature came from Gogols The Overcoat, then the whole of twentieth-century music after 1950 comes from Gruppen. Fifty years later, one can still share Kurtgs astonishment. Its not just that the work remains amazingly innovative and inventive; even the circumstances under which it arose still seem hard to credit. One is dealing here with a work by a post-war orphan in his late twenties who had graduated from the Musikhochschule in Cologne only a few years earlier. Previously he had had only one orchestral work Spiel played, in controversial circumstances (a subsequent one, the first version of Punkte, was withdrawn unperformed). Now, working initially in complete isolation, in a little attic flat in a Swiss alpine village, he suddenly came up with a work that redefined the possibilities of orchestral music, both sonically and conceptually. In a book of interviews published in 1959, Robert Craft asks Igor Stravinsky What piece of new music has most interested you in the last year?, and the octogenarian master-orchestrator replies Stockhausens Gruppen; he goes on to especially praise the sound of the orchestra, and the rhythmic invention.
Gruppen is written for an orchestra of 109 musicians, Straussian in size, but not in constitution: in addition to prominent parts for piano and electric guitar, it calls for no less than 12 percussionists. However, the most obvious novelty of this orchestra is that it is divided into three spatially separated groups one to the left of the audience, one in front, and one to the right each of which has its own conductor. A primary reason for the three conductors is that, for much of the work, the.......
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Editor's Info:

In mid-1957 the Hungarian composer Gyrgy Kurtg, then at the very start of his career, arrived in Cologne. He missed the premiere of Stockhausens Gruppen fr 3 Orchester by a few months, but when Stockhausen played him a tape of the work, he was utterly astounded. Later, he said if Dostoevsky once said that Russian literature came from Gogols The Overcoat, then the whole of twentieth-century music after 1950 comes from Gruppen. Fifty years later, one can still share Kurtgs astonishment. Its not just that the work remains amazingly innovative and inventive; even the circumstances under which it arose still seem hard to credit. One is dealing here with a work by a post-war orphan in his late twenties who had graduated from the Musikhochschule in Cologne only a few years earlier. Previously he had had only one orchestral work Spiel played, in controversial circumstances (a subsequent one, the first version of Punkte, was withdrawn unperformed). Now, working initially in complete isolation, in a little attic flat in a Swiss alpine village, he suddenly came up with a work that redefined the possibilities of orchestral music, both sonically and conceptually. In a book of interviews published in 1959, Robert Craft asks Igor Stravinsky What piece of new music has most interested you in the last year?, and the octogenarian master-orchestrator replies Stockhausens Gruppen; he goes on to especially praise the sound of the orchestra, and the rhythmic invention.

Gruppen is written for an orchestra of 109 musicians, Straussian in size, but not in constitution: in addition to prominent parts for piano and electric guitar, it calls for no less than 12 percussionists. However, the most obvious novelty of this orchestra is that it is divided into three spatially separated groups one to the left of the audience, one in front, and one to the right each of which has its own conductor. A primary reason for the three conductors is that, for much of t.......
more