Page 62 - BBC Music (January 2020)

Bui!ing a li"ary
Violin Concerto
György Ligeti
Steph Power is entranced by all manner of dazzling soundworlds as she
explores the best recordings of this 20th-century virtuoso showstopper
The composer
Born in Romania in 1923, György
Ligeti lived until his early 30s in his
native Hungary. With restrictions
imposed on his composing style by
the country’s communist regime,
he fled to Vienna soon after the
Soviet repression of the Hungarian
revolution in 1956. There, he
emerged as a major figure of the
avant garde, developing orchestral
techniques that included, most
famously, micropolyphony, as
can be heard in works such as
Atmosphères. It was, though, the
use of his music in Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey that brought
wider fame. He died in 2006.
Building a Library
is broadcast on Radio 3
at 9.30am each Saturday
as part of Record Review. A highlights
podcast is available at bbc.co.uk/radio3
64 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
The work
György Ligeti’s wild, radiantly paradoxical
Violin Concerto has captured the
imagination like few other modernist
works of the last 30 – even 50 – years.
The piece was composed between 1989
and ’93 for the German violinist Saschko
Gawriloff. Initially in three movements, it
was premiered in that form by Gawriloff
and the Cologne Radio Symphony
Orchestra under conductor Gary Bertini
in 1990. Ligeti then revised the first
movement and added a further two – a
version premiered by Gawriloff in 1992
Every player becomes a soloist as Ligeti draws
on a kaleidoscope of sounds and techniques
with Ensemble Modern, conducted by
Peter Eötvös. Subsequent re-orchestration
of the third and fourth movements
produced the definitive, five-movement
work heard today.
The rigorous composition process
was characteristic of Ligeti. In the 1990
programme booklet he wrote: ‘I compose
very slowly, destroying ten or 20 attempts
before attaining the final score … the
creation of art is not an everyday task and
I must achieve, without compromise, the
end result which is my imagined ideal.’ He
was 66 when he began the concerto, and
long recognised as one of Europe’s greatest
living composers. He was also a strong
individualist who had come to occupy
a unique position at the core, and yet
GETTY, ARENA PAL, ALAMY sceptical, of the avant garde – a seeming
contradiction that his Violin Concerto
richly encapsulates while transcending
in its Bartókian appeal. Full of outlandish
timbres, abrupt swerves and expressive
extremes, the piece is an extraordinary feat
of imagination – and it requires just that
from its virtuoso soloist, conductor and
22-piece chamber orchestra.
Indeed, every player becomes a soloist as
Ligeti draws on a kaleidoscope of sounds
and techniques: from medieval hocket to
renaissance ostinato and Baroque chorale;
Eastern European folksong to Congolese
polyrhythm; Romantic lyricism and
modal tonality to complex dissonance
and untempered tunings; ethereal
dreamworlds to profound melancholy
and surreal humour; sometimes all at
once, and saturated with an underlying
ambivalence. With self-borrowing thrown
into the mix (there’s a melody from his
1951-3 Musica ricercata, for instance), it
all amounts to a virtual compression of
Ligeti’s career within one brilliantly taut
piece. Multiple contrasts are not simply
juxtaposed, however, but integrated within
the context of recent discoveries in ways
quietly as radical as those he pioneered in
earlier years.
In the 1960s, colour-packed works
such as the Lux aeterna (1966) – famously
purloined by film director Stanley
Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey – had
established Ligeti at the vanguard of new
techniques and soundworlds. However,
while peers like Stockhausen and Boulez