Inside Light (Musical Work)

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    Review: ‘Inside Light’ Gives a Taste of Stockhausen’s Opera Epic

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    At the Park Avenue Armory, a five-hour selection of pieces from the 29-hour “Licht” cycle is best appreciated as a marathon performance.How often can you describe five hours of excerpts from an opera as a drop in the bucket of the whole?But Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic “Licht” — 29 hours of enormous forces, fanciful notions (a camel as candidate for galactic president) and loopy cosmogony — is no ordinary opera. It calls for multiple spaces, and at one point multiple helicopters, dwarfing even Wagner’s mighty “Ring,” a mere dozen or so hours that can fit in a single theater.Presenting bits of “Licht,” as the Park Avenue Armory is doing with the vivid yet meditative, ultimately stirring “Inside Light,” still means presenting quite a lot. For viewers, it’s a six-and-a-half-hour commitment, counting a pair of intermissions and dinner break. But it’s worth it: Written over about 25 years starting in the late 1970s, and never produced — because it’s almost unproduceable — all at once, “Licht” is one of the sui generis works of art from the turn of the 21st century.In Amsterdam in 2019, the stage director and impresario Pierre Audi put on a three-day festival of chunks from the cycle, which is divided into seven operas, each named for a day of the week. As the Armory’s artistic director, Audi has now brought to New York a yet smaller, but still valuable, selection.You can see the program in two parts, half on Wednesday, half on Thursday. But I recommend going on Friday to see it as I did: a back-to-back marathon. With Stockhausen (1928-2007), the experience blossoms, and becomes more oddly moving, the more of his music you take in, ending up greater than the sum of its parts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stockhausen’s Adventures in Space and Time at the Armory

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      An elliptical halo of thin, concentrated light floated in the capacious drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory on a recent morning, above a circular space designed to dissolve your sense of space and time.At the center was Kathinka Pasveer, the widow of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, performing his electronic music at a console. Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, sat nearby, visibly delighted by the scene around him. To his right and left, idiosyncratically shaped video screens faced each other across a round expanse dotted with lights that moved and changed color as Urs Schönebaum, the designer, spoke into a headset while riding a scooter.After a brief pause, Schönebaum cued various elements: Out of darkness and silence emerged eerie sounds that traveled freely through the space from unseen speakers; the videos throbbed with the music, their brightness, with the changing lights, creating an illusion of a void beyond the circle. It became difficult to track the passing minutes. The pleasant spring morning outside might as well have been another world.Kathinka Pasveer, Stockhausen’s widow, performing his music at the Armory on Urs Schönebaum’s very lighted set.Balarama Heller for The New York TimesSuch is the effect of “Inside Light,” the Armory’s theatrical presentation of electronic music from “Licht,” or “Light,” Stockhausen’s monumental, impractical cycle of seven operas written from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Defying simple explanation and traditional form, these works, by turns comical and mystically sublime, deal with cosmic clashes of good and evil, with intimate dramas and global politics, with the nature of music itself.At the Armory, listeners will hear five electronic pieces that make up just a sliver of the 29-hour cycle, but even that will be substantial. They will be performed over two nights, beginning on Wednesday, or as single-day marathons for those who want to get lost in the sounds of Stockhausen, who died in 2007 and influenced the likes of Kraftwerk and Björk.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More