First, a confession: I have not done as the composer wishes. I have not transferred these recordings on to cassette, put on earphones, closed my eyes and moved my fingers over a real or imagined keyboard as the music unfolds. Stockhausen may well be correct in his claim that his music—even these relatively early compositions— ''trains a new kind of human being''. But it's the old kind who is likely to buy this record—if, that is, a measure of irritation and even distaste at the tone of the composer's sleeve-note is sufficiently offset by fascination with the language of the music itself.
My recommendation is that, however you choose to listen, you start with Side 2. Piece X lasts for almost 30 minutes, and is a wholly enthralling experience, from that period of the late 1950s and early 1960s when some of Stockhausen's most powerful and direct works—Kontakte, Momente—were completed. The piece is a remarkable demonstration of how the composer could rethink the sound of an instrument without calling on electronic aids, and Bernhard Wambach is a brilliant advocate for its dazzling blend of elegance and aggressiveness. In his hands the patterns of clusters and glissandos, danse textures and long silences, suggest a post-nuclear Gaspard de la nuit, the poetry and pugnacity, delicacy and devilment in constant interplay. The occasional disruption of the silences on my copy by surface clicks was not a major distraction, and the recorded sound is magnificently lifelike, especially at the upper and lower extremes of the instrument.
The other, earlier pieces are less exciting. The brittle assertions of I to IV now seem more like exercises than fully-formed structures, and the contrast of repetition and fragmentation in IX is also a blueprint—an idea about form, fundamental to many major later pieces but here stated in relatively primitive fashion. Throughout Bernhard Wambach confirms that he is one of the most dedicated and persuasive of interpreters of Stockhausen's piano music, and even if he is not actually a 'new kind of human being', he is doing as much as is humanly possible to persuade today's listeners that tomorrow's music (even when written the day before yesterday) is already well worth hearing.'