The Space of Beauty

The premiere of Klaus Lang’s “tönendes licht” did not take place quite as anticipated. Composed for organ and spatially distributed orchestra, the work was due to be performed at St. Stephen’s cathedral, Vienna, in November 2020. In the end, due to ongoing restrictions brought on by the pandemic, the four sections of the orchestra, spread between the church’s western and northern nave and its altar to the east, encircled an almost empty center. “It was a completely crazy situation,” Lang said when we spoke on video call in February. “It was me, a few journalists, my wife and the head of the festival. The cathedral is a huge place. And they were just playing for 20 people or so.” Fortunately, the event was also captured on tape and the recording, conducted by Peter Rundel, is now available from Kairos.

Born in Graz, Austria in 1971, Lang is renowned for the great intimacy of his music and the way his smeared orchestral textures create a sense of timeless stasis and inner silence. Often employing stretches of extremely quiet dynamics, his music has in the past found a natural home on labels like Another Timbre and Edition RZ, which have cultivated their own distinctive aesthetic between the worlds of sound art, improvisation and composition, and between noise and silence. Though he remains less well-known in the Anglosphere, his noh-inspired 2008 opera “Die Architektur des Regens” (“The Architecture of Rain”) premiered at the Munich Biennale in 2008, and in 2010, he won the Andrezj-Dobrowolski-Prize for composition. At the behest of Katharine Wagner herself, in 2018, Lang became the first composer to premiere an opera at Bayreuth since Parsifal in 1882. 

Still an active performer (at the organ), when we talked I found Lang taking time out of his busy teaching schedule at Graz’s University of Music and Performing Arts to practice for another CD recording of his own music. Dressed in a zip-up fleece and thick, black-framed glasses, he spoke softly but carefully, with the bright eyes and benevolent features of a baby hamster. On March 17, he will be at London’s Royal Academy of Music for a performance of his (2023) work “Diaphonia” for electric guitar and ensemble.