Pièces Pour Piano I XI

Description

"Despite, or even because of, the great importance of the composition of sound colors in my vocal and orchestral works and my electronic music, I have always focused, at certain moments, on pieces for piano, on the composition for one instrument, for ten fingers, with meticulously detailed nuances of color and sound structure. These are my 'sketches.'" These sketches, as Karlheinz Stockhausen calls them, far from being mere preliminary drafts, constitute the very essence of his compositional thought. This is true of the eleven Klavierstücke on this double CD - the complete piano works of the composer, excluding those written for synthesizer or derived from the operatic cycle Licht - written between 1952 and 1961 and performed by Sabine Liebner, a specialist in 20th-century American composers. Pieces I to IV are written according to doctrinal serialism: each event is predetermined, a scrupulous part of an ordered whole. Moving away from a certain musical 'pointillism' towards a 'grouped' composition, the later pieces benefit from greater freedom - all relative, as they respond to the characteristic internal structures of the score. The culmination of this evolution, Klavierstück XI, designed based on a 6x6 matrix (36 elements reduced to 19 for accessibility and readability of the score - a single page), forms a perfect paradox: although meticulously notated, each performance of the piece is unique, dependent on the square on which the performer’s eye falls. She offers us two versions of it, on a fundamental disc of one of the composers most resolutely looking forward, without a glance at the past. (Bernard Vincken)