I haven't heard the recording, but I know it's one of the most important discs of new music of the last decade: thanks to a chance meeting with the trumpet players of Ensemble Modern on a train from Frankfurt to Würzburg, I now know that their performance of Helmut Lachenmann's Concertini is out on CD. Actually, it has been for a couple of years, on Ensemble Modern's own record label – it just took Valentin Garvie and Sava Stoianov to tell me about it on an ICE train for me to realise. No excuses – apart from Ensemble's lack of a record distribution deal in the UK. (Somebody, get their discs in the shops here!)
I've been waiting for this recording since 2005. The last concert of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival that year, which I programmed, was the British premiere of Concertini, which Lachenmann composed especially for Ensemble Modern. It's up there in the handful of life-changing concerts I've been to. Concertini is one of Lachenmann's most ambitious, powerful, and even flamboyant pieces; he throws sound around the concert hall, splitting the virtuoso musicians of Ensemble Modern into smaller groups that surround the audience.
No group of players performs Lachenmann as well as Ensemble Modern (and that includes the London Sinfonietta, who gave the London premiere of Concertini in 2006; it was a pale imitation of the Ensemble Modern performance). They have spent years working with him, and they've created what amounts to an oral tradition, since Lachenmann has worked in minute detail with each of the musicians, preparing the sonic extremity of pieces like Mouvement or Ausklang. His music requires a total commitment from his performers, who need to believe in the beauty and expressivity of the techniques he demands from the musicians. Nothing is off-limits in Lachenmann's musical world, and he can create massive, symphonic structures made from sounds that would usually be thought of as mere "noises" – string players bowing the outside of their instruments, wind players making pitchless breath-sounds, brass players creating strange percussive tremors – as well as the more traditional notes produced by orchestral instruments (although when you do hear a "normal", pitched sound in Lachenmann, it sounds alien, completing his music's inversion of the usual priorities of Western music). It's music that at once shatters the limits of instrumental possibility, and rebuilds something ever richer and more mysterious from the rubble.
Concertini is one of his masterpieces. If you've got a surround sound system at home, you'll get the full effect of the forces being lobbed around the space. But even if you haven't, Concertini will work in humble stereo, since there's enormous delicacy in the music, too, as you can hear in the two-minute taster on the Ensemble Modern's site. The performance on the CD comes from Berlin, a month before the Huddersfield gig, but they had already toured the piece since the summer. Unmissable. And, while I'm at it, I'm going to get hold of Ensemble Modern's discs of Ausklang (with Strauss's Alpensinfonie) and Nun. Just a shame the Euro is so expensive for the UK at the moment. Even so, 20 Euros for Concertini is cheap for the riches in store on the disc. I promise!
