Helmut Lachenmann

The title Ausklang (Final Notes, or Fading Away) is intended to be understood literally. Lachenmann's Musik für Klavier und Or-chester is centrally concerned with final notes and sounds fading away. In particular, it is concerned with piano sounds created with certain techniques (playing silently at the keyboard, special ways of operating the piano pedals, etc.). It is also concerned with the fading away of sound as the sounds of the piano are being picked up by the orchestra just as they are about to die away. But Ausklang is also a backward escape into the future, as it were, for Lachenmann playfully transforms the traditional orchestral apparatus and formal stereotypes employed in his music. “After I have turned the rituals into the object of reflection, I play them through,” Lachenmann once said. Despite its smaller scale and compressed dimensions, Tableau points into the same direction.