In a post earlier today, Reader film critic Ben Sachs wrote about Helicopter String Quartet, a Frank Scheffer film documenting the 1995 performance of the piece of the same name by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died in 2007. The movie is screening at the Nightingale on Friday and Saturday. This summer, as part of the festivities accompanying the Summer Olympics in London, the quartet will be performed as a component in the world premiere of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht, a five-hour opera that perfectly embodies the composer’s wild ambition (or unmatched hubris, depending on your position).
