At the end there was even an encore due to the warm applause for the gnarly and friendly Helmut Lachenmann who was present and his noisy, sometimes wild, sometimes lurking, almost creeping music: once again the eight horn players of the BR Symphony Orchestra sat down in the round in front of the conductor’s podium and performed that furious, fast-paced solo which, in the last piece of the evening “My Melodies” for eight horns and giant orchestra, had caused sheer astonishment for the first time within this symphonically varied, even wild hustle and bustle.
In order to gain insight into Lachenmann’s bold musical adventures, it was good to only hear pieces by him from different periods of his career at Musica Viva. It began with a 1977 guitar duo “Salut für Caudwell”. Christopher Caudwell, the Marxist-oriented English writer, died at the age of 30 fighting Franco’s fascists in Spain. In its radical nature, taking the guitar to the extreme, Lachenmann’s piece sometimes seems like a highly excited shadow theater, in which sentences by Caudwell are also quoted. Mats Scheidegger and Stephan Schmidt offered this hot, whispered music brilliantly.
Yuko Kakuta and Pierre-Laurent Aimard acted no less forcefully on “Got Lost”, music for high soprano and piano from 2007/08. How, based on Nietzsche and Pessoa texts and an advertisement for the loss of a laundry basket, the singer starts to sing, click, wheeze, cheek drums and warbles, the pianist plucks his grand piano, strikes it or uses forearm clusters, the singer achieves echo effects with top tones, sung into the piano , was exhilarating in the best sense of the word and highly artistic.
After the break, the premiere of the second version of “My Melodies”. The quite pompous piece already made an impression in the first version of 2018. Conductor Matthias Hermann now convinced with overview and commitment as well as the orchestra in the best of moods with this often attacking, gripping music.