In a recent review of music by Rebecca Saunders on this label (10/01)‚ I remarked that her work lends itself admirably to recording despite its obvious emphasis on the physicality of the performers. The same might be said of Helmut Lachenmann’s music‚ and for quite similar reasons. One could easily imagine these many breathy‚ scratchy sounds being drowned out in a concert­hall by an inadvertent cough. This recital demands a quasi­analytical mode of listening‚ and a degree of patience‚ for the pieces included here do not disclose their trajectories readily. Having said this‚ the counterpoint between recognisable (if fractured) ‘musical’ gestures and noise­based sonorities can assume a very playful guise. This is especially true of Mouvement (­ vor der Erstarrung)‚ composed in the early 1980s‚ which comes across as an abstracted scherzo punctuated by a number of quite clearly defined episodes (to which the composer has given names like ‘timed madness’‚ ‘fluttering beats of the organ’ or ‘quaking fields’) that tend towards a final dissolution into stillness. There are‚ along the way‚ intriguing insights into the nature of sound and our perception of it: how‚ for example‚ the ringing of alarm­clocks can change the way we hear a variety of more familiar orchestral sounds (like a flute flutter­tongue). The morphing of the ‘non­musical’ into its opposite is also a feature of ‘zwei Gefühle…’: Musik mit Leonardo (da Vinci)‚ in which Lachenmann counterpoints the German translation of a text by the Renaissance man in various ways: both with itself (allocated to two speakers‚ both of whose roles are assumed here by the composer) and with the instrumental sonorities provided by the large ensemble. But the result is very different from Mouvement: bleaker‚ starker‚ more intractable. Written in part as a response to the death of Luigi Nono in 1990‚ the work certainly shares with Nono’s music a reluctance to compromise. Of the four works on this recording‚ it is the most difficult to ‘get into’‚ and should perhaps be experienced on its own. The last two works‚ Consolation I and II‚ are also the earliest (1967­68‚ with the first revised in 1990)‚ and were both written for Clytus Gottwald’s Schola Cantorum Stuttgart. Consolation I adds a quartet of percussionists‚ while the second is for 16 voices a cappella. Though perhaps less distinctive than the orchestral works (and audibly related to other scores written for the Schola during this period)‚ these may be the most immediately accessible pieces here. As so often with the production of this label‚ the performances are of a high order‚ and admirably recorded. But as I intimated above‚ it strikes me that the works have been placed in the wrong order. After several hearings I venture to recommend that you programme the disc so that the shorter choral pieces are placed between the larger orchestral ones‚ with ‘…zwei Gefühle…’ coming last: this gives each piece a space of its own.