What's On / Proms by Day

One of the most influential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, Karlheinz Stockhausen would have turned 80 this year.

Aside from the performance of Punkte ('Points') by the Gürzenich Orchestra under Markus Stenz on the actual day that would have been the composer's 80th birthday (Prom 48), this Stockhausen Day offers a fuller immersion into the work of this uniquely uncompromising creative force.

This early-evening Prom contrasts a pair of Stockhausen's early works - Gruppen ('Groups'), which passes ideas between three spatially separated ensembles, and Kontakte, referring to 'contacts' between instrumental and electronic sounds - with two recent works - both of them excerpts from Klang, the large-scale sequence on which Stockhausen was working at the time of his death last December.

In this Late Night Prom comes Stimmung for six amplified voices - the first work of Western music to be based on the harmonics, or overtones, that make up the sound-spectrum of a single note. Stimmung is a hypnotic piece for 'six singers and six microphones' that takes on a unique atmosphere in live performance. Among the many influences which Stockhausen acknowledged when composing the work was a month spent wandering among the ruins in Mexico.

The Theatre of Voices - as adept in music of the Middle Ages as in new music - have made something of a speciality of Stimmung, and Hillier's long association with the piece includes his participation as one of the singers at a Proms performance 30 years ago.