Musikfest Berlin | All of Berlin hates the New Music Police

"If you walk across a meadow and step on a snail's head, you've practically ruined its existence. There's a tiny pianissimo crack that you hear." This quote from composer Helmut Lachenmann can be understood as a plea for a kind of clairaudience—the redefinition of a hearing that is sensitive to even the smallest sounds. In his brief introduction to the concert featuring works by Lachenmann and Shostakovich at the Berlin Music Festival, conductor Vladimir Jurowski referenced actor Denzel Washington, who, as ex-agent Robert McCall in "The Equalizer 2," says that there are "two kinds of pain in this world: the pain that hurts and the pain that changes."

The work of the almost 90-year-old Helmut Lachenmann, whose works are a focal point of this year's Berlin Music Festival, can be located between these two poles. Lachenmann is considered the founder of a "musique concrète instrumentale," that is, a "sound production in which the instrument as a resonant body is explored and exploited down to its most secret sound recesses" (Guido Fischer). He creates a magical world of sounds. He cares nothing for listening expectations and habits; quite the opposite: he challenges the status quo of "classical" music production and rebels against any complacency in ingrained comfort zones.

Lachenmann's basic compositional attitude is subversive, and can be traced back not least to his teacher and friend Luigi Nono, from whom he acquired "a clear awareness of the historical relevance and significance of musical material" as well as "a critical reflection on political history and the present" (Jörn Peter Hiekel).

The performance of "Ausklang," the "concertante music for piano and orchestra" composed in 1984/85 by the phenomenal pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSB) under Jurowski, was a highlight of the entire festival. "Ausklang" is a monster of a work—for the pianist, for the orchestra, for the audience, not least because of its performance time of approximately 50 minutes—but a truly joyful monster. A composition full of boldness and adventurousness, demanding, unsettling, and stimulating (in a way that the audience at the premiere of Beethoven's "Eroica" may have experienced—that is, with a certain degree of overtaxation).

"Helmut Lachenmann brings into his music what is happening in the world outside," writes Steffen Georgi in the program booklet. With all the shimmering sounds, with the tender tones of the piano that can no longer be altered and gradually "fade away" in the hall, and with the massive percussion apparatus, including four pedal timpani, two bongos, six Japanese temple gongs, four tam-tams, four Chinese cymbals, 16 woodblocks, three snare drums, six tom-toms, three metal blocks, and two thunder sheets—mostly instruments with indeterminate pitches, requiring eight percussionists to operate them—Lachmann creates a "fortissimo of emotional impact," as he himself notes. The listeners are completely captivated by time and space; there is no outside anymore, only the inside of Lachenmann's cosmos of sound and noise. A "sound house" is emerging, as Francis Bacon called this utopian place in "New Atlantis" 400 years ago. Or "free music in a capitalist society" – that's what Iggy Pop said.

With countless, mostly tiny gestures, islands of sound and fading are generated, be it in the piano or through the floating sounds of the wind instruments in the middle section, when the musicians simply blow into their instruments soundlessly, creating wind noises; "wind" is the English term for wind instruments. With single notes and clusters, with repeated notes and quickly thrown-together, almost fragmentary figures, with brief scraping movements of the strings and numerous piano glissandi, the composer creates "music with images," as the work is described in its subtitle.

"The title 'Ausklang' sounds quite poetic," Lachenmann admits. "But I meant it in a very technical sense. A piano actually only plays decays all the time. That means the notes disappear again and again, they fade away. And this element can be illuminated and developed in all sorts of directions." Even to the point of a "forest rustling," which Lachenmann, who prefers the term "noise" to "noise" for his music, considers "a wonderful experience."

A week earlier, the Ensemble Modern, a fortunate regular at the music festival, performed Lachenmann's "Concertini" (2005), which the composer wrote for this very ensemble, under the direction of one of the leading conductors of new music, Sylvain Cambreling. "Concertini" can be understood as a kind of opus summum of Lachenmann's engagement with the entire "aesthetic apparatus" and musical vocabulary of bourgeois music. Lachenmann, a father figure of contemporary composition, once again reveals himself as a master of scraped and croaking tones; he calls "Concertini" himself a "scratching concerto."

"Concertini" literally means several small concertos, and each instrument is treated as if in a solo concerto, with unusual playing techniques that demand the utmost virtuosity from the players. In this work, Lachenmann not only tackles the "noisy" and the alienated, but also "the unalienated, the familiar, the consonant in the broadest sense" with the aim of "constantly shedding new light on everything that sounds and moves in such a changed context" (Lachenmann is also an outstanding author and music theorist).

The composer remains true to his subversive approach to common expectations – something the New Music police certainly take offense at. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, for example, could recognize neither a "content-aesthetic idea" nor a "concept" in "Concertini" in 2009. While Lachenmann was previously always considered the German representative of an aesthetic of resistance, Mahnkopf now sees in "Concertini" merely a "perfectionistically played" and "composed without risk" piece of music that can be "listened to with ease," "almost as if it were Richard Strauss" (and indeed, a listener at the merchandising stand in the foyer claims that "Ausklang" is the continuation of the "Alpine Symphony").

With their encore, Sylvain Cambreling and the Ensemble Modern take the provocation of the New Music police to the next level: They perform the orchestral version of "Marche fatale," a delightfully cheerful showpiece, "a carelessly daring escapade," a "minor stylistic aberration for a given occasion," as Lachenmann self-ironically notes, a cryptic earworm. Lachenmann's "musical fun," so to speak, in the sense that "Marche fatale" is "not a composition at all": "To quote Ravel about his 'Bolero': It 'contains no music.' A venial sin."

And considering the first part of the concert, featuring current works by Lisa Streich, which combines the most staid slapstick comedy with yawn-inducing pseudo-provocations, the audience truly deserves Lachenmann's delightful, contrapuntally peppered finale. The old master once again shows the young ones what a rake is.

Lachenmann's latest orchestral work will finally be performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony under the impressive direction of Matthias Hermann: "Music for 8 Horns and Orchestra," entitled "My Melodies," composed between 2016 and 2018 and revised in 2023. "It's not about new sounds; it's about new listening," the composer noted. "But in order to tune into this energy of listening, I first had to suspend my focus on the melody." Anyone expecting melodies from "My Melody" is mistaken. "They convey 'my way of melodies' in the creative use of sound." And: "I always insist that my music is cheerful. The term 'cheerful' encompasses all aspects of seriousness. 'Cheerful' is not 'funny'; "'Cheerful' is not 'funny'. 'Cheerful' can be very deep and complex," Lachenmann said in a 2018 interview about "My Melodies."

The eight horns sit in a horseshoe shape around the conductor at the center of the action. However, they are not soloists, but rather a single, homogeneous and at the same time complex instrument. This contrasts with the orchestra, which also acts partly as a single instrument, then breaks down into its individual parts, and by no means serves solely to accompany the horns. Again and again, individual "melodies" emerge from nowhere, flutter through the space, and fade away. Long passages consist only of the collective, soundless breathing of the wind instruments – the music, the "melodies," breathe in the space. This is a tremendous tenderness.

Finally, in the "Cadenza," too, there are no virtuoso, soloistic self-portrayals, "but primarily an energetic sound field, knitted from scale-like runs that combine into chaotic undulating movements" (Dirk Wieschollek in the program booklet). A breathtaking music of breathing.

It was wonderful to experience Helmut Lachenmann personally attending all the performances of his works at the Philharmonie. The music festival was fortunate to present this cross-section of Lachenmann's works. And it was wonderful to see the outstanding ensembles, which are absolutely worthy of preservation, operated by the local broadcasting companies, whether the RSB or the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the intensity and competence with which these ensembles tackle such complex works.

“The rest is – thinking,” says Helmut Lachenmann.

The concert by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra can be viewed on the Berliner Festspiele website until October 17. The festival runs until September 23. www.berlinerfestspiele.de