Karlheinz Stockhausen

The complete Klavierstücke I-XI by Karlheinz Stockhausen, played by Sabine Liebner on two discs of more than 75 minutes each. The pieces were written over about a decade, from 1952 to 1961, almost as a diary of the composer's work. They track the shift from total serial control to open form and to an ever finer study of piano resonance.

Stockhausen was born in Mödrath, near Cologne, on 22 August 1928 and died in Kürten on 5 December 2007. He was one of the foremost voices of the "music of the future" that young composers imagined after the Second World War, and in 1955 he declared that music would have to be created anew amid the rubble of the past. Liebner has premiered many works by contemporary composers and has recorded John Cage, Morton Feldman and Galina Ustvolskaya. Wergo gathers her recordings in a series under her name. This set is a co-production with Bayerischer Rundfunk, with liner notes by Wolfgang Rathert.

Liebner does not follow the numbering. Each disc opens with a different realisation of Klavierstück XI (1956), a single large sheet with nineteen fragments that the pianist links in any order, each playable in six tempi, dynamics and kinds of attack. The first disc then runs through I-IV, VIII and VII and ends with VI. The second gathers V and IX before closing with X. Her tempi are broad: VI lasts more than forty minutes and X nearly forty-five. In X, written for Aloys Kontarsky, Stockhausen sought a middle ground between relative disorder and order, and denser, more interchangeable structures move towards isolated events.

The underlying theme is the tension between measured time and the time we experience. Stockhausen kept to a single instrument because he found the neutral, universal sound of the piano suited a transparent exploration of timbre and structure. The first performers of these pieces included Marcelle Mercenier at Darmstadt in 1954 and 1955, David Tudor in New York in 1957, and Frederic Rzewski in Palermo in 1962. Piano Street praised the close recording, which catches the resonances in fine detail.

2CD, Wergo WER 73412, released in 2018 in the Sabine Liebner series.