Kagel

An expectant audience has come to the concert hall to hear a new work by a major composer. The stage is set for a large chorus and symphony orchestra to perform. But only about half the performers are in place when the conductor arrives, and he is evidently in distress. He looks as if he is about to say something to the audience, offer some word of explanation. He gapes. No words will come. All he can do is motion to his scattered musicians to draw nearer, and begin.

So starts Mauricio Kagel's Kidnapping in the Concert Hall, which was commissioned by a consortium of halls, including Carnegie, the Cologne Philharmonie and the Concertgebouw, to provide a kind of thing such halls often find themselves presenting: an opera in concert performance—except that in this case there would be no theatrical accoutrements to be imagined. The drama would happen on the concert stage.

Kagel was the right composer to ask, for he has been creating dramas in concert halls for nearly half a century. Here was another opportunity, as he said recently at his home in a comfortable suburb of Cologne, to ‘try to create absolute music that is at the same time dramatic, that has a relationship with theatre atmosphere: not events, but atmosphere’.