Lachenmann Weekend, Southbank Centre

Forbidding German composer supplies a weekend of manna from heaven

by Igor ToronyilalicMonday, 25 October 2010

'Helmut Lachenmann's music is as much therapy as art, reacquainting musicians with their instruments, audiences with their ears. And it delivers this therapy through discovery.'

Helmut Lachenmann is to instrumental technique what The Joy of Sex was to suburban nookie. A conduit to a whole new carnal world. Even those of us supposedly well versed in what a stringed instrument can do watched the Arditti Quartet perform the Lachenmann string quartets at the Queen Elizabeth Hall mouths agape. You can do that? With that! And you're going to stick that where?! We were an audience of gawpers and grimacers, smilers and starers.

But ultimately no instrument takes the plunge and returns to earth. And how happy we all were for that

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Ruthless Jabiru, King's College London / Arditti Quartet, Wigmore Hall review - delicate, dedicated modernism

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