Page 64 - BBC Music (January 2020)
P. 64
Three other
great recordings
Frank Peter
Zimmermann (violin)
Zimmermann’s
masterly rendition
was recorded in 2002
under the composer’s
watch. Conductor Reinbert de Leeuw
and the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble
create sublimely balanced sonorities
through which the violin sings with
supple elegance and an unerring
sense of purpose and direction.
Ligeti’s extremes of tessitura – ultra-
high horns, piccolo and percussion
contrasting laconic low flutes, cellos
and clarinets – are delivered with
unrivalled otherworldly clarity. The
resulting tensions are thrillingly pushed
to the limits of bearability.
(Teldec 8573876312)
Jeanne-Marie Conquer
Moldovan magician: (violin)
Kopatchinskaja combines Brilliantly teamed
technique with passion with Ensemble
InterContemporain
and Matthias
The best A truly phenomenal experience Pintscher, Conquer’s 2015 disc brings
recording rich warmth and resonance, allied
with adventurous spirit. Contrasting
modes of attack are thoughtfully, edgily
altogether new dimensions, conjuring a delivered, conveying the impression,
performance that feels wrought from her for example, of the violin grappling for a
very nerves and sinew. hold within a skittering Aria – Hoquetus
Wonderfully precise and controlled, – Choral. The ensuing, embattled
she and the ensemble still manage to Intermezzo gives way to a compellingly
convey the sense of spontaneity and risk schizoid Passacaglia and Appassionato,
inherent in a score full of startling gestures
and unusual sounds. The result is a kind
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)
Ensemble Modern/Peter Eötvös Kopatchinskaja and Eötvös In the Praeludium, Kopatchinskaja’s
Naive V5285 initial, open-fifth arpeggios are blurred
The stars quite simply align in this maximise Ligeti’s extreme with particular immediacy by ‘mis-
stupendous 2012 recording by Moldovan dynamics and articulation tunings’ as the ensemble joins her,
violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja with indicating the simultaneous tension and
Ensemble Modern and Peter Eötvös – of transitional space in which technical enchantment to come. Ligeti described
the ensemble and conductor who had brilliance and playful theatricality the character of this first movement as
premiered the five-movement Violin exist to serve mercurial, deeply felt ‘glassy, shimmering’ and its diaphanous
Concerto in 1992. emotions. Crucially, this underlines the harmonics as ‘the expression of fragility
Of course, the soloist then was Ligeti’s distinctly eastern European sensibility and danger’. And so it exquisitely proves,
dedicatee, Saschko Gawriloff, whose from which the concerto springs: where leading to a second movement Aria –
subsequent premiere recording with microtones and complex cross-rhythms Hoquetus – Choral rich with the molten
Ensemble InterContemporain and Pierre are customarily part of music’s expressive yearning of its central folk melody.
Boulez continues to set an eloquently high fabric – and where folk traditions are not The movement scheme of the concerto
bar. But Kopatchinskaja takes things into just part of history, but a lived reality. is broadly fast-slow-fast-slow-fast, and
66 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
