Being in London on Stockhausen weekend (early August: should be an annual national holiday), I went to the Prom: the one featuring Gruppen (so good they played it twice) and Kontakte in a feast of spatialised sound. Gruppen uses three orchestras with a conductor each. Some lucky prommers were wedged in the middle of them as the bands batted chunks of sound around.
Kontakte made great use of the available space at the Albert Hall: the whole hall behaved like an instrument. (It’s like that too, when the organ lets rip.) Compare David Hockney’s thoughts on A Bigger Grand Canyon – which hangs in Canberra’s Australian National Gallery:
‘…the thrill of standing on that rim of the Grand Canyon is spatial. It is the biggest space you can look out over that has an edge.’
The superwhizzyness of Kontakte does something similar for me soundwise.
As I left the Albert Hall there were three classic Routemaster buses parked outside in Prince Consort Road. Awaiting three conductors, perhaps?
