At the close of a review in this publication of Sabine Leibner's unacceptably sloppy recording of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I–XI a few years ago, I expressed a desire for a twenty-first-century recording of this epoch-making cycle that would reflect ‘an era in which the urgency of the aesthetic preoccupations that set [the series] in motion have perhaps faded a bit, and acquired a historical patina that can be seen from a distance, almost affectionately’.Footnote 1
Enter Miharu Ogura. Ogura is very young (not yet 30, and thus born 35 years after this cycle was completed) and first encountered Stockhausen's work only a few years before this live recording was made, in 2021. In other words, we are not dealing here with a Tudor or Henck or Kontarsky, who were there for the creation of these works and grew alongside them, nor with a Leibner or a Pi-hsien Chen, of a later generation but steeped in the tradition and musical milieu that these Klavierstücke played a part in engendering.
In other words, again: Ogura's relative youth and the freshness of her relationship with this repertoire help her show us a Stockhausen with the novelty worn off, and along with the novelty the polemic, and the messianism, and the rhetorical trappings. The new horizons opened by the Klavierstücke had been at least provisionally mapped, their implications digested, before Ogura was born. What is left, then, is the music, stripped of its baggage if not its swagger, and of its pretense if not its substance.
The pieces are presented here out of order. We begin with VI, alongside X one of the longest pieces of the cycle, largely dedicated to a language of clouds of individual points. These collections of events do not tend to form composite wholes like their cousins in X; they behave, rather, as tense whorls of charged particles, each with their own force fields keeping them separate from their neighbours.
This material proves to be an ideal showcase for Ogura's approach to the cycle as a whole. In her hands – here as elsewhere in this traversal, especially in those works based on clustered groups of events – the material's contrasts and fissures are respected but not emphasised. They are not glossed over or smoothed out, but nor are they allowed to dominate the music's counterbalancing debt to a tradition of filigree pianism that goes back, whatever Stockhausen may have said or been intending, from Ravel via Liszt to Chopin. It is not so much – and all of this seems to me to come through in Ogura's playing, somehow – that Stockhausen is invoking the great nineteenth-century virtuosi, but rather that he and they are confronting the same problem by the same means: how to create a maximalist pianism, a grandiose and ambitious rhetoric, through that piecing together of individual mechanical actions that the piano demands. To put it briefly: Ogura's VI, as an opening salvo, lets the Liszt back into Stockhausen, subtly, through a side door, just as the composer does, perhaps unwittingly.
Where hard edges are required, though, Ogura happily and ably provides them. The quartet of small pieces that open the cycle but follow after Klavierstück VI on the first disc of this recording are energetic, alienated mazes, with marked attention to the dissonant slipped-gear rhythms of the nested tuplets and the constantly off-kilter little streams of regular pulse they create. There is no Liszt here, nor should there be. And in V, which seems in retrospect like a tentative step away from the language of I–IV in the direction of ‘group composition’, the terraced, mutually repelling levels of dynamics and articulation that permeate I–IV are articulated with no less concentration for being spread out, infiltrated with substantial silences and little bursts of melody and filigree.
There are cavils to be made here as well. This is, again, a live recording, of a complete traversal of the cycle (!) from a festival in Stockholm, and there are occasional and inevitable approximations and passing lapses of attention or possibly stamina. The increased technical demands of VII, with its tolling middle C# and precise control of resonance through the silent depression of keys, generate a few prominent missed notes and accidentally sounded silent actions, and the fineness of distinctions of touch required by IX result in a few things falling through the cracks. More broadly, sometimes – quite possibly also an artefact of liveness, evidence of fatigue – things tend towards a middle ground with rather less character than what is on the page. The filigreed opening of X, for example, is more a comfortable (or tired; if the running order of the album is that of the concert, this was the final piece) mezzo piano than Stockhausen's charged ppp, though the contrast with the opposing fff material is still rigorously maintained. The sound is also far from ideal: quite dull, quite shallow. A studio recording made under less extreme marathon conditions would, I suspect, serve Ogura, and the music, somewhat better; but the sense of liveness and occasion, if one can remember to keep it in mind, generates its own level of interest.
I do not expect Ogura's Stockhausen to take a place in the pantheon of classic recordings of these works. The razor-sharp technique of the classic recordings and the ferocity of their commitment are, in the final analysis, not quite there. But Ogura should be heard; she adds an important chapter to these works’ long legacy, and she opens a space for interpretation. This is truly Stockhausen as repertoire, seen from 70 years’ distance, the urgently stated concerns of all those bespectacled men in skinny ties in front of Darmstadt blackboards not faded, really, but seen clearly for what they are: an expression of a musical impulse no less human and no less open than any other, no less tied to an idea of expression that can take its vital place in the still-vital history of its instrument's repertoire.
