Son Trumpets a Renaissance for New Music’s High Priest

There was a time when Karlheinz Stockhausen was the high priest of new music, the yardstick of how far out you could go, his influence leaping over boundaries to inspire artists as diverse as the Beatles and Miles Davis. Then came a long period when he seemed to be an outdated relic of complexity, as the Minimalists, neo-Romantics, and others took the lead.

Nevertheless Stockhausen plunged onward, working doggedly on his gigantic, still-unfinished seven-opera project, “Light.” Now, with the resurgence of interest in early electronic music among Generation Xers, he may be on the brink of a renaissance.

Los Angeles got a rare glimpse of “Light”--at the Monday Evening Concerts in LACMA’s Bing Theater--courtesy of the composer’s son, trumpeter Markus Stockhausen, and the superb Italian bassist Stefano Scodanibbio. These were mere tantalizing samples, wrenched out of their vast context, yet indicative of Stockhausen Sr.’s apparently undiminished power at creating strange, mesmerizing electro-acoustic sound scapes in the digital age.

Most impressive was “Pieta” (from the opera “Tuesday”), a nearly half-hour fluegelhorn soliloquy over a ghostly, sustained, even lush electronic tape that built to a magnificently streaking climax. At times, this lonely space voyage evoked similar ideas by none other than Davis, thus returning the compliment. “Halt” (from “Thursday”) incorporated some theatrical poses as Markus Stockhausen and Scodanibbio carried on an expressive musical discussion. “Aries,” from the mid-’70s work “Sirius,” develops into a trumpet dialogue with gently ring-modulated chime-like electronics that eventually track together in unison.

Looking every inch the young prince, his mutes slung around his waist like grenades, Markus Stockhausen cut quite a charismatic figure, producing an encyclopedia of trumpet, fluegelhorn and piccolo trumpet effects with unmistakable nuances borrowed from jazz.

There were also seven quizzical dialogues from “Ruckblick” for trumpet and bass by Gyorgy Kurtag and a delicate, even wistful solo piece by Scodanibbio (“Alisei”) played at the lowest possible volume. The only disappointment was a spare, uneventful closing improvisation by the two that went nowhere.