Page 63 - BBC Music (January 2020)
P. 63
BUILDING A LIBRARY
Orchestral page-turner:
Ligeti draws on a multiplicity
of sounds and moods;
(below) Gary Bertini conducted
the premiere of the Violin
Concerto’s first version
craved freedom from the past, Ligeti bass, creating an eerie effect heightened by
found himself seeking freedom from natural horns and wobbly ocarinas.
the orthodoxy they themselves came to Similarly, complex matrices inspired
represent. An exile from Soviet-dominated by the discovery of Conlon Nancarrow’s
Hungary, he loathed dogma and ultimately player piano studies, and of ‘marvellous,
refused to reject a heritage that included polyphonic, polyrhythmic’ African
diatonicism and indigenous traditions. music, push asymmetric folk tunes and
Yet Ligeti was also far from the nostalgic counterpoint into unexpected realms
that some hearing his Brahms-dedicated across bars and polymetres, creating dense
Horn Trio in 1982 feared he might have yet intricate, volatile textures.
become. On the contrary, he was driven Through and above all this the soloist
by a modernist impulse to interrogate soars, skitters and laments in ways that
the past through the present and vice are as unleashed as they are ultimately
versa. This he did with great curiosity and grounded in familiar concerto traditions.
skill, savouring ‘irregularities’ and the With co-creative spirit, Ligeti invites
‘disorganised’, as he put it, from within ‘a the player to compose their own final
set of rules adequate to the idea’. Tellingly, much taken by 1980s theories of chaos and cadenza if they so wish, or perform the
he noted of his Piano Etudes: ‘In my music, fractal mathematics, and the piece reflects one originally written by Gawriloff using
one finds neither that which one might call a corresponding, almost synaesthetic discarded early material.
the “scientific” nor the “mathematical”; but fascination with colour, pattern and form.
rather a unification of construction with Incorporating ancient and non-Western Turn the page to discover
poetic, emotional imagination.’ microtonality, an orchestral violinist and the best recordings of
The Violin Concerto wonderfully violist tune their instruments to an ‘out of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto
showcases these principles. Ligeti was tune’ natural harmonic from the double
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 65
