It is 11 years since Mauricio Kagel died, but it’s still hard to pinpoint where he fits into the busy history of music since 1945. Though he lived most of his adult life in Germany, he was born in Argentina, and in an important sense he remained an outsider.
He was a leading member of the European avant garde but always seemed slightly apart from it, satirising its conventions and conceits while consistently blurring the boundaries between what belonged in the concert hall and in the theatre.
Yet his works remain little known in Britain, certainly compared with those of some of his contemporaries. But the latest concert in the London Sinfonietta’s Turning Points series was devoted exclusively to Kagel – solo instrumental and ensemble pieces, mostly from the 1960s and 70s, one of his films and some music theatre, though almost all his works contain some element of the theatrical.
Tim Hopkins had directed the evening, and began it himself as the protagonist of Présentation, in which an oleaginous compere makes a series of increasingly deranged attempts to introduce a famous chanteuse who resolutely refuses to appear, while a pianist (Fali Pavri) fills in with robotic, vamp-till-ready accompaniments. Pavri also played the evening’s nearest thing to a conventional concert piece, the solo-piano À Deux Mains, while the tuba player Stuart Beard gave startlingly vivid performances of two classic examples of Kagel’s instrumental theatre, Atem and Mirum, the second of which ends with the player delivering the words of the Tuba Mirum section of the requiem mass.
Match, in which a to-and-fro “game” between two cellists (Tim Gill and Joely Koos) is refereed by a percussionist (David Hockings) is one of Kagel’s best-known works, but it was also good to see again the film Antithese, with its electronic music soundtrack and surreal, Buñuel-like cinematography, in which a sound engineer is overwhelmed by the technology he’s supposed to master.
Typically for Kagel, the most outwardly conventional piece in the programme was the most disquieting. Fürst Igor, Strawinsky, written for the centenary of Stravinsky’s birth in 1982, is a setting for a bass (the appropriately dark-toned Jimmy Holliday) and ensemble of a section of text from Borodin’s Prince Igor. They are delivered in measured solemnity, but then a white-clad figure appears, tapping a piece of wood with a mallet. Quite baffling but haunting, too.
