Imagine it: four helicopters hover far above a concert hall, the sound of their rotors barely audible to those inside. In each helicopter is a member of a string quartet: no individual musician can hear his fellows, but their collective performance is synchronised via click-track; a microphone is attached to each instrument and another picks up the sound of the rotors. There is also a cameraman in each helicopter, his lens trained on the musician. Sound and images are fed back through a giant console in the concert hall. The noise of the rotors is mixed with the tremolos of the strings and projected into speakers placed all around the auditorium, and the four performers are visible on columns of video-display units. This is Stockhausen's Helicopter Quartet.
Naturally the work caused quite a stir when it was first performed in 1995 at the Holland Festival by the Arditti Quartet, and some readers may have already made up their mind that this is too far-out for serious contemplation. And yet ... what if this CD were to become a cult classic? Certainly it is a crazy idea, but many of Stockhausen's ideas have been so considered in the past, and have yielded astonishing music. The CD presents an incomplete account of the composer's conception since it denies you the full effect of the spatial relationships and the visual experience of the live performance; but the sheer impact of the sound is sufficient to hold the listener's attention (well, this one's, anyway) for the duration of the piece. That said, there are moments when its direction is far from obvious, and Stockhausen's obsession with numbers finds baffling expression when the players begin sporadically to recite 'eins, zwei, drei, vier, funf ... '
This is the sort of thing that has commentators of Stockhausen's recent music pulling their hair out, but it meets the cult-classical requirement of real eccentricity. And then there are moments that are emphatically convincing: the final descent (from about 26'00''), which Stockhausen revised for this studio montage, is one. A video exists of rehearsals, interviews with the composer and the performers, and excerpts from the first performance. I remember Irvine Arditti, looking straight into the camera and saying, deadpan: 'He [Stockhausen] certainly knows what he wants. 'But even this experienced quartet must have regarded the project as truly special. Seekers-out of the bizarre, string quartet aficionados, '60s nostalgia-buffs, or simply the musically curious, should overlook the short playing time (what could possibly cap this?) and experience this fascinating piece.'