Stockhausen - Kontakte (Barton/Rhys) review | classical album of the week

The Guardian 80

George Barton/Siwan Rhys
(All That Dust, download only)
Percussionist Barton and pianist Rhys’s binaural recording adds another dimension to Stockhausen’s textures and reveal his musical thinking

Almost every work that Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote in the 1950s seemed to break new ground, but few have had a more lasting impact than Kontakte, which he planned in 1958 and realised over the following two years in the electronic studios of West German Radio. The score exists in two versions – as a purely electronic work on tape, following the equally groundbreaking Gesang der Jünglinge that Stockhausen had completed immediately before it, and as an electro-acoustic piece (his first, and one of the first ever composed), in which the prerecorded sounds are combined with live instruments, a piano and percussion.

The electronic music was created as a four-channel tape, and that vivid, spatial element of the work emerges with startling immediacy in this first binaural recording of the electro-acoustic version, with percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys. Heard through headphones, their performance gives a tingling sense of the aural perspectives that played such an important role in Stockhausen’s musical thinking at that time, and which he had just explored in the concert hall with Gruppen, for three orchestras.