By happy coincidence,
I happen to be writing this review on and around 24 December
2006, Mauricio Kagel's 75th birthday, which is the occasion
for which Winter & Winter have brought out this special
edition. This set has been limited to 3000 numbered copies,
and celebrates the diversity of Kagel's creative output in the
1960s and 1970s. "Beautiful packaging - crazy music" is how
my mate Graham of Leeds respectfully sums up Winter & Winter's
productions, and while this is of course a sweeping generalisation,
Kagel's work in this set does seem to fit the description like
a glove. The CDs are housed in a nicely bound gatefold cover
in W&W's typically thick card, with a nicely illustrated
and informative booklet in German and English. All of the works
presented have been digitally re-edited and re-mastered by Kagel
in 2006.
Mauricio Kagel as
a creative force has long been a kind of legendary figure for
me. Discovering his light and often humorous touch via BBC broadcasts
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was delighted to discover
his incredible 'Two-Man Orchestra' machine on permanent exhibition
at The Hague's Gemeentemuseum and have been itching to have
a go on it ever since. Many of his ideas are regularly
'rediscovered' by composition students I have come across at the
Conservatoire - I know, I have to admit we did it too. His influence on
'contemporary classical' music is inescapable - even if you think you are
being original, you will quite often find he did it all already,
thirty years ago. Within the space of a few days I have had
my Kagelian horizons broadened once again with Naxos's new release
of 'Duodramen' and other later works, and this set, which brings
to life some of those mad stories and fascinating film stills
which awakened my imagination - obviously more than my resources
of inquisitiveness - all those years ago.
CD 1 emphasises
Kagel as a performer as much as a composer, the improvisational
elements in his work of the time turning the musician into a
decisively important link in giving his intentions form in sound.
The first piece, Pandorasbox, is written for and played
on that insanely illogical instrument the bandoneon, whose
obsolescence appears only to have been avoided by the popularity
of the Argentinean tango tradition. The original mono recording
has been given a new lease of life in this re-processed version,
and the work sounds fresh and up-to-date. Clusters and
bellow-shakes, the dissonant resonances between keyboards,
clattering wood, whistles and laughter from the performer - all
of these elements create a strangely elemental sound-world. The
performer - Kagel himself - almost seems swallowed into the belly of a big bandoneonbeast,
writhing and quivering in ghastly mirth at the absurdity of
the whole situation.
Tango Alemán
has that inescapably pungent and emotionally entangling
instrumentation of bandoneon, piano, violin and singer - whose
text in this case are scat, but in the words of the composer,
expressive of "disappointed hopes, of the remembrance of past
longings, of... unhappy love". This 'unintelligible phantasy
language'
is eloquently ardent, nostalgic and passionate by turns, ranging
in Kagel's vocal performance from something akin to medieval
chant, to a gravel-gruff Tom Waits bass. Argentinean by birth,
Kagel has the tango in his blood, but while the instruments
always retain their tango identity there is little opportunity
for ballroom dancing - this is the essence and the atmosphere
of tango, the personification of the genre in a nightmarish
scene where the beautiful bare feet which bled against the broken
glass strewn on a bar-room floor are long gone, forgotten by
all but the dark, brooding singer.
Bestiarium, Music
for bird calls in three movements is "a score about freely
invented zoological encounters". Kagel had been collecting bird
calls and hunter's whistles for many years, so it was always
going to be a logical step for him to create a piece for them.
Three performers have a number of identical whistles, and a
variety of different ones, so that the pitches and gestures
indicated in the score can be 'transposed' and transformed by
the adoption of a new bird. There is a great deal of variety of
sounds, although a good number of them are quite high pitched
and potentially hard on the ears. The birds and animals are
sometimes imitated as intended, and sometimes the whistles are
used purely musically - the effect being about as far away from
Messiaen's kind of references and compositional practice as
possible. Sometimes magically nocturnal, aboriginal, certainly
bestial in character, the fascinating potential of the various
materials used in the whistles and the environments from which
they have their origins are sometimes disturbingly realistic.
It still might not be easy to take it all in as thoroughly enjoyable
music, but close your eyes and let it wash over you, and you
might find things appearing inside your mind's eye that you
never knew where there.
The second disc
is taken up entirely with Kagel's first Radio-Piece or Hörspiel,
Ein Aufnahmezustand (A Recording Situation). Klaus
Schöning, the producer of this work, writes a memoir in the
booklet notes about how the piece was put together - the actors being given
little more than a 'project description' rather than a text,
and their actions and words being constantly recorded even
without their knowledge. There is no story, although the brain
might stretch to provide its own narrative. There are noise
events, sounds typical to a radio sound-effects store cupboard,
unusual vocal noises, some singing and music, but the overall
effect is like that of a dream from which you are always about
to awake in a cold sweat - but never do. There are Dadaist traditions
which might trace the origins of such work, but it is equally
interesting to follow the resonances which follow. It is sometimes
difficult to put your finger on or prove such influences, but
I will bet my collection of used wisdom-teeth that composers
like Globokar, Stockhausen, Berio, Cage and many more all heard
Kagel's pioneering work in this field at some stage.
The script extracts
for the DVD third disc: Ludwig van which are given in
the booklet, alongside stills and pictures of the film in production,
end with "This film is truly a report". Indeed, the character
of the filming in the first half, which is largely done with
a shoulder-held camera, has very much the feel of a documentary,
albeit a bizarrely strange one. The visual images are punctuated
by Kagel's familiar improvisatory language, based around the
work of Beethoven. In some ways more significantly Beethoven's
own music "will sound as if He could still hear it in 1826.
Pretty badly". Extracts from symphonies are played by small
ensembles, sometimes sounding like they are attempting the music
as if reading from sight. Despite this reversal of our memories
of polished performances, the strength of Beethoven's genius
remains irrepressible - the music takes on a kind of Kurt Weill
café orchestra character at times, and we are given insights
into the mad world in which listeners and musicians must have
found themselves when presented with the challenges of his work
for the first time.
Filmed in black
and white, the early sequences are something of a time-capsule
for those who might never have seen a train or a railway station
with manual doors, or a proper record shop, filled with the
image-rich sleeves of the top LPs of the time. The camera dips
to show early 19th century breeches and buckled
shoes - we are looking at the world through Beethoven's eyes, discovering
the familiar anew, all the while aware of the suspension of
disbelief: Beethoven knows how to open the train door, coolly,
while the train is still moving, and the amused or baffled glances
of the public are for his strange dress and disturbingly familiar
looks, not because someone is walking along with a large film
camera on their shoulder.
Beethoven certainly
knows the way to his own house, and it is within these environs
that many strange scenes enfold. The bath filled with "busts
of L.v.B made of fat or marzipan covered in chocolate are piled
up in a bathtub filled to the brim with water". Beethoven lifts
each head out, many of them so badly dissolved to be unrecognisable.
The associations with decay and human remains make this more
than a little repellent, but this is a theme which suffuses
the entire film. The music room with which every surface has
been papered with Beethoven's music will be familiar to many,
stills of which have been some of the most reproduced images
from the film.
Intensely of its
time but arguably about 30 minutes too long, there are elements
in this work which rattle around in the brain long after having
seen it. The brief clip of some conducting ribs is one, and
I must admit to finding the 'Morning Drinks Show' with as a
theme for redundant debate and diatribe "Is Beethoven Abused?"
quite hilarious - I'm sure many others who work in the often
petty and pretentious world of classical music will agree. The
whole film is a kind of deconstructivist 'Tombeau de Beethoven',
from the scores falling from the cupboard, the disappearing
protestations of Beethoven's supposed last living ancestor,
the banality of objects (medals, ear-trumpets, boots and the
eternal flame-in-a-drain) and of the 'chit-chat' which was one
of Beethoven's weaknesses, dung, decay and dissolution: the
symbolism is clear, and sometimes a little heavily plastered
over what is otherwise some fascinating material. Even the beautification
of Beethoven's music with recordings and performances by Herbert
van, no - is it von Karajan? - is denounced as a
disservice to Beethoven - he's damned if he does, damned if he didn't and
anyway he can't anymore because he's dead. Poor old Beethoven
can't win in this film, but the beauty of it is, despite everything,
he does win: Beethoven is Everything; we are the dopes,
the passive pelicans, chimps and cud-chewing camels in the zoo.
This is an entirely
fascinating and absorbing issue, and most certainly a must-have
for fans of Mauricio Kagel. While not all of the music or aural
and visual imagery is universally appealing there can be no
denying the vibrant, energetic creative brain at work. This
issue revives the vigour of a time in which anything seemed
possible, and in which pioneers such as Kagel explored barely-trodden
avenues and expanded them into highways of avant-garde creative
production. We'll never have the chance to say it again, so:
happy 75th M.K!
Dominy Clements
The
Mauricio Kagel Edition
CD I, Musicians: Mauricio
Kagel, Alejandro Barletta, Jorge Risi, Carlos Roqué Alsina, Beth Griffith,
Mesías Maiguashca
]
