Prom 20: Stockhausen

Stockhausen Gruppen 24’ Klang, 13th hour – Cosmic Pulses (for electronics) 32’ UK premiere Klang, 5th hour – Harmonien for solo trumpet c15’ BBC commission: world premiere interval Kontakte 35’ Gruppen (repeat performance) 24’ Marco Blaauw trumpet Nicolas Hodges piano Colin Currie percussion BBC Symphony Orchestra David Robertson conductor Pascal Rophé conductor Ludovic Morlot conductor One of the most influential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, Karlheinz Stockhausen would have turned 80 this year. Aside from the performance of Punkte (‘Points’) by the Gürzenich Orchestra under Markus Stenz on the actual day that would have been the composer’s 80th birthday (Prom 48), this Stockhausen Day offers a fuller immersion into the work of this uniquely uncompromising creative force. This Prom contrasts a pair of early works – Gruppen (‘Groups’, 1955–7), which passes ideas between three spatially separated ensembles, and Kontakte (1958–60), referring to ‘contacts’ between instrumental and electronic sounds – with two recent works – both of them excerpts from Klang, the large-scale sequence on which Stockhausen was working at the time of his death last December. Tickets cannot be exchanged refunded or resold.