Helmut Lachenmann Sylvain Cambreling SWR Sinfonieorchester - Lachenmann Das Mdchen mit den Schwefelhlzern +Album Reviews

The new ways of the opera.

Francisco Yanez Calvino | Santiago de Compostela, GALIZA, Spain. | 11/15/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is the only "opera" composed by Helmut Lachenmann until today, and I really can hardly call this opera, it would be better to call it "music with images" or "Musik mit bildern", like it's called in german. In fact it's music to be played like an opera, with orchestra and a stage where a story is being developed. If you add live electronics and tape you have, together with the voice, the efforts of this Lachenmann's work, a kind of synthesis of his previous works, like it happens with Ligeti's "Le Grand Macabre".

The work is based in the tale of the little match girl seller, put together with texts of Gudrun Ensslin, an "idealist" from the Germany of some decades ago, and some words by Leonardo da Vinci. Both girls have to fight with the capitalist society for her surviving and for the success of her idea. The music tries to follow them fights and them final losing, as the little seller shows, dying frozen in the streets, something wonderfully put in music by Lachenmann with the orchestra playing in a terrifying pianissimo done with the strings, two pianos and electronics. A final part really remarkable as one of the most impressive in the history of the music, as the forgotten and the inner cold are masterfully described.

This ECM release is the Tokyo edition of the work, from the year 2000, a second version after the one Kairos has released, the german one. I have both of them and I can say there are not many differences really, as the booklet explain. The most important one is in the second CD, in the part called "Musik mit Leonardo" (a piece you can find alone in some other CDs: Kairos & ECM, this last one played by the Ensemble Modern is my favourite performing of this work); in this Tokyo edition, this part is much more frozen, much more desolated and empty, taken out all the amazing ensemble playing the previous version had. In this CD you can listen the own Helmut Lachenmann in the talked part, like he did in the Kairos release of this piece, together with the strings in pianissimo and some presence of the drums. The pieces is much more impressive in the original edition, anyway, having both it's a good way to discover some other possibilities, as Lachenmann did, but for lovers of his music, of course.

The reason why I give four stars and not five is because even it's a great performing, in my opinion a bit better than Kairos' one, I can imagine a better way to do this work, like the Ensemble Modern has shown to everyone who have their recording of Lachenmann's works or to those who have listened his Lachenmann live, an experience for not to be lost.

Sound is good, better than Kairos' release, but I really think this is an opera to be listened in SACD 5.1 multichannel, a possibility not available nowdays.

We have to remember ECM they have some other recordings of Lachenmann's works waiting to be released, like the very last piece Lachenmann had composed, "Concertini", recorded by ECM with the Ensemble Modern, or "Ausklang". I hope they released it soon.

Together with Le Grand Macabre, Prometeo, Die Hamletmaschine, The Mask of Orpheus... one of the better "operas" or "scene music" of the last decades.

"

The last great opera of the 20th Century?

Jeremy Glazier | Columbus, OH | 08/12/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Or the first great opera of the 21st?

Helmut Lachenmann's opera--here substantially revised from the original recording--is nothing short of breathtaking. I first encountered Lachenmann through the Arditti Quartet recording of his 2nd String Quartet; fascinated by the "noise," I picked up Schwankungen am Rand the instant I saw it and wasn't disappointed. I only hesitated briefly at the prospect of an opera (not generally my preferred genre), and I don't regret going with my gut instinct.

The modification of the libretto in this version centers around the "Leonardo" text/scene. According to Lachenmann's note, the text "is removed from the musical context with which it was originally interwoven--it is liberated and can now be, if not easily understood by the listener, then at least auditively deciphered..." Paul Griffiths writes, "Now comes the excursion to Leonardo's cave--the 'leap from the wintry fairy tale to southern latitudes...quasi via satellite,' as the composer puts it....Instead of being the distant creator, the composer is here with us, as narrator."

The deconstructed text is absolutely beautiful in its own way: the way Jackson MacLow's poem is beautiful in Ferneyhough's Fourth string quartet (1990). In both cases the texts are fractured and the shards interwoven with the weft of musical fabric. The effect is NOT "frigid" overintellectualized theory. It is the music of our moment."

Brutal, icy shards of sound

R. Hutchinson | a world ruled by fossil fuels and fossil minds | 08/07/2004

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Helmut Lachenmann is inventive, and I completely sympathize with his commitment to Adorno and a critical perspective on our commodified society. But despite my attempts for over a year, I have concluded that "Das Madchen," which is deliberately ugly, has no redeeming qualities that make it worth listening to. I can only hope that the music works when presented along with the visuals in its operatic form, but in its own right, this is two discs and two hours of auditory torture.

I am not familiar with the conductor or the singers on this new recording. [On the Kairos version, the conductor Lothar Zagrosek and Sarah Leonard, one of the sopranos, are both very accomplished in the avant-garde arena.] But quality performance, conducting and recording cannot surmount the problem of the score, which consists of persistent sibilant sounds from the vocalists (sh-sh-sh-sh-sh...) conveying the icy cold of the little match girl, and fragmented scrapings from the orchestra. There is no structure, or momentum, or variety, or relief. This may well have been Lachenmann's intention, but if so, I am just not masochistic enough to extract any enjoyment out of my pain.

Lachenmann misses a huge opportunity with "Das Madchen." He incorporates a text from the 1960s radical Gudrun Ensslin into the libretto, a fierce poetic indictment of the alienation of the commodified society. (She was convicted of burning down a shopping mall in protest of overconsumption while millions starve.) But these words are never heard! Perhaps in the opera they are projected onto a screen, I don't know. But the potential power of juxtaposing the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the little match girl who burns all her matches and dies in the cold street and the radical girl who burns the shopping mall, is lost, and there is nothing dramatic in the score that utilizes the juxtoposition. There is also a long digression into a text from Leonardo da Vinci, and while this works well enough as a stand-alone piece, it is not at all clear how it adds to the story of "Das Madchen mit den Schwefelholzern."

If you are interested in Helmut Lachenmann, I recommend the ECM disc called SCHWANKUNGEN AM RAND, which is fantastic (see my review). But I can't recommend "Das Madchen," either the original Kairos recording or this new one from ECM."

A composer who has long pushed the boundaries of music now c

Christopher Culver | 05/08/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Helmet Lachenmann makes no ordinary music. The German composer (born 1935), long toiling in obscurity, has won increasing admiration for his style of "musique concrete instrumentale", where in lieu of defined pitches he constructs his music out of a series of whatever instrumental timbres tickle his fancy. Think lots of scraping and thudding. This is about the most avant-garde work out there, but his works are surprisingly engaging and once walks away from the piece remembering quite a lot of it.

Lachenmann's opera "Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern" (The Little Match Girl, 1990-96, rev. 2000) is no ordinary opera. It would probably be easy to make a straightforward dramatic adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's sad tale of a little street urchin on New Year's Eve who burns all the matches she has to sell just for a little warmth, and then freezes to death in an alley. Lachenmann, however, has heavily abstracted the story and told it in a very individual fashion. In his opera, the little match girl is represented only by voices making ssh-ssh noises representing shivering or occasional soprano vocalisms. The music is concerned much more with what is happening around her. We hear sounds of carriages in the street, the striking of her matches, the glittering of a Christmas tree, and snow swirling about.

Lachenmann has recently begun to comment on the Western tradition he long ignored, but his way of doing so is dispassionate. The protagonist walking past brightly lit windows is represented by what Lachenmann suggests is music playing from the radios inside: the opening chord of Boulez' "Pli selon pli", Stravinsky's "Danse de l'elue", and other sounds each from Schoenberg, Beethoven, Mahler and Berg. These quotations are single gestures, thrown out and isolated from any musical whole, and seem almost tragic.

The little girl's gaze into the flame of her matches inspired Lachenmann to suddenly shift the action at one point quite far away. He incorporated a text by Leonard da Vinci on the volcanoes of southern Italy. The text speaks of a terrifying abyss which Leonardo gazes into, and this may well be the darkness at the heart of Man that would let a little girl perish in the street. Lachenmann further incorporates, spoken quickly by a male reciter, a text by German terrorist Gudrun Ensslin, which further emphasizes the social critique projected onto Andersen's story.

An earlier version of the opera has been recorded on a Kairos disc, which I haven't yet heard. For this Tokyo version, the "Leonardo music" has been abridged, where the speaking part remains but the music has been reduced to a mere five gestures. The original music will still exist in the repertoire, having been spun off into the standalone work "...zwei Gefühle..." (available on another ECM disc). I believe also the ending here, involving the Japanese traditional instrument called the sho, might be new for this version.

Lachenmann's unorthodox stylings can be expected to divide audiences, and even if some might like one work of his they might not like another. I can understand negative reactions to this opera. However, for me this is an work of awesome proportions and impressive dramaturgy (even if its drama is not always directly comparable to Andersen's tale). I've listened to it all the way through, more often than many traditional operas in my collection. I do sometimes wonder about the elegance of the Leonardo inclusion, for which I therefore award four stars instead of five, but I nonetheless recommend this to fans of modernist music."

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	Helmut Lachenmann, Sylvain Cambreling, SWR Sinfonieorchester Lachenmann: Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern Genre: Classical
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