Concertante recording of Helmut Lachenmann’s groundbreaking opera, and
the first to feature the revised version, the so-called “Tokyo-Fassung”
which the composer now regards as definitive. The opera, while loosely
based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale is not a work that admits
of a single “meaning”, its plotline is multiple and diffuse, but an
undercurrent of social criticism is implied as Lachenmann views the
pauper (The Little Match Girl), the terrorist (Gudrun Ensslin)and the
visionary artist (Da Vinci) all as outsiders, figures on the fringes of
society, driven to the margins by circumstances and by society’s
coldness, and, in consequence, playing with fire in their responses.
Coldness, figuratively and literally, is one of the opera’s subjects.
Extreme cold and burning desire, as attitudes and conditions,
counterpoint each other in the music. The action evolves through the
suggestibility of the sounds which Lachenmann deploys like no one else
and with a poetry all his own. “Not only is ‘The Little Match Girl’ by
far the biggest work of one of Europe’s most esteemed composers, but it
magnifies the qualities of strangeness and intensity, of huge but
frustrated power, that have given him his reputation” (Paul Griffiths,
The New York Times)Concertante recording of Helmut Lachenmann’s groundbreaking opera, and
the first to feature the revised version, the so-called “Tokyo-Fassung”
which the composer now regards as definitive. The opera, while loosely
based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale is not a work that admits
of a single “meaning”, its plotline is multiple and diffuse, but an
undercurrent of social criticism is implied as Lachenmann views the
pauper (The Little Match Girl), the terrorist (Gudrun Ensslin)and the
visionary artist (Da Vinci) all as outsiders, figures on the fringes of
society, driven to the margins by circumstances and by society’s
coldness, and, in consequence, playing with fire in their responses.
Coldness, figuratively and literally, is one of the opera’s subjects.
Extreme cold and burning desire, as attitudes and conditions,
counterpoint each other in the music. The action evolves through the
suggestibility of the sounds which Lachenmann deploys like no one else
and with a poetry all his own. “Not only is ‘The Little Match Girl’ by
far the biggest work of one of Europe’s most esteemed composers, but it
magnifies the qualities of strangeness and intensity, of huge but
frustrated power, that have given him his reputation” (Paul Griffiths,
The New York Times)
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