Lachenmann: Das Madchen mit den Schwefelholzern.

LACHENMANN: Das Madchen mit den Schwefetholzern

* Morikawa, Tibbels; Lachenmann (speaker); Sugawara, Hemmi, pianos, Miyata, sho; SWR Vokalememble Stuttgart, SWR Sirfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, Cambreling. No text or translation. ECM New Series 1858/59 (2)

Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935) certainly knows how to use sound to communicate bone-chilling cold. The threadbare opening of the German composer's modernist, sociologically critical take on Hans Christian Andersen's tale of The Little Match Girl--muted violins sustained on a stratospherically high Aflat--sounds like a ghostly wind machine. Soon, it splinters into shards of sounds: clattering mallets, breathy flute effects, sliding strings, nasty flashes of brass, and other ghostly, disconnected scurryings, both acoustic and electronic. It definitely sounds frigid. The match girl herself is represented by two occasionally appearing sopranos, who make shivering, stuttering sounds of their own.

There are no texts or translations here, but critic Paul Griffiths's detailed synopsis/ analysis helps us follow the familiar narrative thread: the poor freezing girl has her slipper stolen, she imagines the warm coziness inside the houses along the street, she lights her remaining matches to fight off the chill, she has a wondrous vision of her grandmother, and, at the moment of her death, they ascend heavenward together. In addition, Lachenmann provides two substantial interpolations: one is a letter written from prison in 1975 by the German radical Gudrun Ensslin, who had burned down a shopping mall to protest the overconsumption it represented amidst a world ...