Karlheinz Stockhausen

Featuring: Ensemble Musique Vivante

condition (records/box): M / M (still sealed)  | The definitive recording of one of Karlheinz Stockhausen's supreme achievements. Momente - for soprano solo, four choir groups and thirteen instrumentalists - was composed between 1962 and 1969, and exists in multiple versions. This 3LP box presents the complete "Europa Version" of 1972, world-premiered by Stockhausen on 8 December 1972 at the Beethoven Hall in Bonn and taken on European tour thereafter, plus on side F an extended excerpt from the earlier 1965 Donaueschingen version. The work's formal principle - "moment form," where self-contained sections can be reordered, each a complete experience rather than a station on a developmental journey - was Stockhausen's most radical challenge to Western music's dependence on narrative teleology. What emerges is not collage but something stranger: a work that seems to exist in all its moments simultaneously, as if time had been opened up and laid flat.

Gloria Davy is the soprano soloist throughout the Europa Version, and her presence transforms the work. Brooklyn-born (1931), she replaced Leontyne Price as Bess in the 1954 international tour of Porgy and Bess, became the first African-American to sing Aida at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958, performed under Karajan at the Wiener Staatsoper, and gave the world premiere of Henze's Nachtstücke und Arien at Donaueschingen in 1957. Based in Geneva from the 1960s, she was celebrated for the dark richness of her lirico-spinto voice and her extraordinary mastery of pianissimo - the art of maximum audibility at minimum volume. In Momente, her voice is not accompanied by the ensemble: it is the centre around which everything orbits, moving between speech, song, laughter, clapping, whispering, and pure sound with total conviction. The Donaueschingen excerpt features Martina Arroyo as soloist, with members of the Kölner Rundfunksinfonieorchester.

Stockhausen conducts, with Diego Masson, Peter Eötvös and Godfried Ritter as assistant conductors - Eötvös years before his own emergence as a major composer. The Chor des Westdeutschen Rundfunks Köln, prepared by Herbert Schernus, is the work's true body: the four choir groups sing, speak, stamp, clap, snap fingers, and produce a universe of vocal-percussive sound that makes this one of the most extraordinary choral recordings ever committed to disc. The Ensemble Musique Vivante provides the thirteen instrumentalists. Cover illustration by Mary Bauermeister, to whom the work is dedicated - Stockhausen's partner through the 1960s, a visual artist whose own work explored related ideas of simultaneity and transparency. The 44-page booklet includes Stockhausen's own extensive notes, formal schemes, sung texts, and photographs, with English translation by Hugh Davies.

3LP box. Deutsche Grammophon 2709 055, 1976. Recording engineer Klaus Hiemann (Europa Version), Heinz Wildhagen (Donaueschingen Version).