A fan of German composer and electronic pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen from an early age, Craig Armstrong jumped at the opportunity to create a piece of music for the Barbican’s 2002 Stockhausen Festival.
The commission led Armstrong to revisit the work of Luchino Visconti, who directed the 1971 classic Death in Venice. As Armstrong says, ‘After reviewing the film, in particular the static opening scene of the lagoon, I decided to base the piece around the opening bars of Mahler’s fifth symphony which was used for that scene.’
What results is, Armstrong hopes, an homage to the work of Mahler and Visconti and to the sampling techniques of Stockhausen; a variation on the theme of greats gone by.
