HELMUT LACHENMANN MY WAY
DEBUNT FILM
Smart, poised documentary about a classical radical
8/10
Wiebke Pöpel’s My Way traces the life and motivations of German composer Helmut Lachenmann with clarity and gentle humour. Hinged, in some ways, around his 1996 opera The Little Match Girl, the documentary captures both Lachenmann’s drive and the external forces that contextualise his rough yet elegant ‘musique concrète instrumentale’. Some of the parallels made between Lachenmann’s art and his everyday life are heavy-handed, but it’s a great portrait of the self-proclaimed “last fossil of the Darmstadt generation”.