This is that rare phenomenon, a recording of a major work by Karlheinz Stockhausen in which the composer himself seems not to have been directly involved. It is, however, no less faithful to the spirit of Mantra than the DG recording by the Kontarsky brothers, which Stockhausen did supervise (7/72—nla). Yvar Mikashoff and Rosalind Bevan capture the moments of humour as effectively as the longer periods of reflectiveness and exuberance. Their playing is never overemphatic, and they are not weighed down by the diverse mental and physical demands of this taxing score.
For the listener, Mantra is not so much taxing as quixotic. The immediate effect of the consistent electronic treatment of the piano sound (ring modulation) can be disconcerting, as if the composer is choosing a complicated way of making modern concert grands sound like ageing, out-of-tune uprights. But Stockhausen's purpose is not to distort, rather to distance the music from mundane naturalism. My dictionary defines a mantra as ''a sacred text used as an incantation'', and deems the term relevant to music having a ''mystical effect''. Stockhausen's pursuit of the 'other-worldly' encourages him to transform conventional sounds in ways which he believes intensify their spirituality, and sympathy with these objectives is a pre-condition for complete identification with the musical results. Yet even sceptics (of whom I am one) can still respond to the resourcefulness of the invention as Mantra unfolds, the composer tells us, ''in 12 forms of expansion and 13×12 transpositions''. And however other-wordly Stockhausen's concerns, it is hard not to feel a very human excitement at Mantra's central climax when the players throw a basic motivic shape to and fro—a kind of musical table tennis—or at the dizzy virtuosity of the final toccata, which is ''a compression of the whole work into the shortest space of time''.
It is perhaps a pity that the accompanying booklet with this well-recorded performance does not include the composer's own notes on Mantra. It is certainly to be regretted that the listing of tracks does not give the corresponding bar numbers from the published score. Even so, this weird and wonderful music demands to be heard: mystical or not, the effect is magnificent.'