More than eight years after Mauricio Kagel’s death, it’s still not easy to fit him into the landscape of European music in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Argentina, Kagel moved to Europe in 1957, and as a late arrival on the post-1945 avant garde scene, he always seemed happy to cultivate his position as an outsider. His works were often wry and perceptive critiques of what his contemporaries were doing and and at their best they questioned the whole purpose of music and the assumptions on which it was based.
Towards the end of Kagel’s life, the teasing, confrontational world of his earlier pieces, with their theatricality and regular attacks on the conventions of performance, was often abandoned in favour of pieces that brought together bundles of cultural and historical references. The eight pieces for this “salon orchestra”, The Compass Rose, define that world better than any of his other works. Composed between 1988 and 1994, they were named after the directions on a compass, with the pieces increasing in length as Kagel became more fascinated by the allusive possibilities they suggested.
As someone who grew up in southern Argentina, Kagel’s associations of geographical directions were very different from those of a European. For him the idea of north-west conjured thoughts of the Andes and the music of its indigenous peoples, while north-east suggested Amazonia. In The Compass Rose, that perspective shifts from piece to piece. South West depicts a musical journey beginning in Mexico and crossing the Pacific to New Zealand; in South East the music looks from Cuba towards Colombia, Venezuela and the Guyanas and the popular musics to be found there; North depicts the elemental sounds of a journey around the Arctic Circle.
That rich fund of references is woven into pieces that are both alluring and disconcerting. They create a musical world that constantly changes, with rhythmic and harmonic discontinuities and non sequiturs, and melodies that never quite end where you expect. The eight pieces can be performed individually or in any combination, and Reinbert de Leeuw and the Schönberg Ensemble recorded the last three, South West, West and North, more than a decade ago. But this is the first recording of all eight, done with wonderful suppleness and wit by Ensemble Aleph. It’s perhaps not a set to play all in one go – more something to savour piece by piece, with regular amazement to be found in the sheer range of Kagel’s imagination.
