Karlheinz Stockhausen

Three works by Karlheinz Stockhausen for clarinet and basset horn, played by Michele Marelli, who worked with the composer for ten years. Marelli describes the disc as a direct expression of the joy that composing gave Stockhausen, and as a collection of the pieces that bound him most closely to him and his music. It joins the five Amour pieces, the theatrical Der kleine Harlekin and Wochenkreis from the opera cycle Licht.

Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a German composer and a central figure in electronic music. Marelli, an Italian clarinettist and basset horn player, recorded Amour and Der kleine Harlekin in Cuneo, Italy, in March 2013. For Wochenkreis he is joined by the synthesizer player Antonio Pérez Abellán, in a recording made the same month in Alicante, Spain. Marelli met Stockhausen at eighteen, moved at the composer's invitation to Kürten near Cologne, where Stockhausen lived, and played many premieres under his direction as a soloist of the Stockhausen Ensemble.

Amour (1974/76) is a set of five pieces for clarinet based on five short poems Stockhausen wrote as gifts for women close to him. The most complex and hypnotic of them is Die Schmetterlinge spielen (The Butterflies are Playing), which follows two butterflies chasing each other, each moving in a different metre and at a different speed. In Der kleine Harlekin (1975) the clarinettist plays a demanding score in costume while performing dance movements notated precisely in the score, engaging the audience by eye and by ear.

Wochenkreis (Circle of the Week, 1986/88) is a duet for basset horn and synthesizer player derived from Montag, one of the seven operas of Licht. It is a series of songs, each with its own intervals, figures and timbres. The basset horn player is a man walking through seven stations, one for each day of the week, on an initiatory journey from birth to ascension to God. The synthesizer player takes the role of Lucifer, the antagonist.

CD, Wergo WER 6785 2, released in 2013, 65 minutes.