Album: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michaels Reise um die Erde (Wergo)

In his later years, Stockhausen gave himself more and more to monumental works, such as the 29-hour operatic cycle Licht, a grand mythopoeic fable based around the days of the week, from whose Donnerstag (Thursday) opera derives Michaels Reise um die Erde (Michael's Journey Around The World).

Performed here by the Cologne-based ensemble musikFabrik, it opens with a bathetic battle of trumpet and trombone, following which the angel Michael, represented by Marco Blaauw's trumpet, circumnavigates the globe in seven steps. The absence of singers makes the piece effectively a trumpet concerto, animated largely by the interplay of horns and percussion: a strange, intriguingly fanciful work from such a sober rationalist.

Download: Eingang, Formel und Abfahrt; Station 3; Mission