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Music at its most urgent extremes from Pierre-Laurent Aimard in the Southbank Stockhausen festival.

Over 10 years after his death, Karlheinz Stockhausen still occupies a complex and difficult place in the canon of contemporary composers. This year's Musikfest Berlin featured a Stockhausen focus, of which the "creation ceremony" Inori was the climax.

Two new music specialists revel in the sheer textural variation of Kontakte. 

After the epic grandeur, sweep and immersive quality of Gesang der Jünglinge at this summer’s Proms, this performance as part of Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival had a lot to live up to. In many ways, however, this far less ostentatious outing overseen by Sound Intermedia got even closer to the work’s disturbing essence.

The 1960s and 70s are famous for breakthrough developments in rock music, but the story was really no different for the field of art music during those decades. The advent of electronics seems to have instilled in composers a fresh thirst for sound-exploration and conceptual writing.