Page 65 - BBC Music (January 2020)

BUILDING A LIBRARY
the energy almost but not quite
carried through into the cadenza.
Nonetheless, the harmonics here are
exquisitely unsettling. (Alpha ALPHA217)
Augustin Hadelich
(violin)
Supported by the
Norwegian Radio
Orchestra, Hadelich
delivers a passionate,
highly personal account. Combining
swashbuckling drama with whistling
insouciance, he locates the off-kilter
serenity in Ligeti’s chromatic lyricism,
finding ways through generous
glissandos and vibrato to an elastic
yet focused sense of pitch and rhythm.
The principal interest of this 2019
recording, though, is Thomas Adès’s
cadenza: a homage to Ligeti that’s at
once touching, urbane and wonderfully
absurd. (Warner 9029551045)
And one to avoid…
There are many
beguiling aspects to
this 2000 recording
from Christina
Åstrand with the
Danish National Radio
Symphony Orchestra, not least their
bold enjoyment of the spectral smudge
afforded by Ligeti’s non-tempered
tunings, lotus flutes and ocarinas. But
the overall conception doesn’t quite
come together, and some curiously
executed ensemble does nothing to
dispel the impression of a patchwork
of textures.
Kopatchinskaja and Eötvös create a
ferocious intensity that links each to
the other, maximising Ligeti’s extreme
dynamics and articulation while making
sense of sudden interruptions and hiatuses
on the very brink of disintegration.
A macabrely spectral Intermezzo
becomes a helter-skelter ride from which
the Passacaglia calmly unfolds. But most
astonishing is how every contradictory
aspect of Ligeti’s invention is gathered
into the final Appassionato. The cadenza
JULIA WESELY, GETTY is Kopatchinskaja’s own, an outpouring of
unbridled virtuosity that celebrates like no
other this passionately enigmatic work.
Concerto collaborators:
composer Unsuk Chin
and conductor Kent
Nagano, 2007
Continue the journey…
Further works to enjoy after listening to Ligeti’s Violin Concerto
redating Ligeti’s Violin Concerto
by five years is his Piano
P Concerto, which he himself
described as his ‘artistic credo’.
The two works have a similarly vivid
orchestral colour, achieved through
the inclusion of instruments such
as the slide whistle and ocarina.
Polyrhythms, shifting accents and
changing tempos also feature in the
Piano Concerto, making it a truly
kaleidoscopic composition. (Joonas
Ahonen (piano); BIT20
Ensemble/Bröoniman Adès demands the soloist
BIS BIS2209) to play at the extremes of
Ligeti’s use of
ocarinas in the the instrument’s range
chorale-like passage
of his Violin Concerto has strong
echoes of the soundworld conjured up
in Berg’s Violin Concerto. Berg’s work
also opens with the four open strings
of the violin, which he then integrates
into a 12-note tone-row. The result
is a shifting pattern of tones, rather
than recognisable tunes. (Isabelle Faust
(violin), Orchestra Mozart/Abbado Harmonia
Mundi HMC902105)
Between 1985 and ’88, Unsuk
Chin studied composition with Ligeti
it was under his mentorship that she
at the Hamburg Conservatoire, and
developed her own distinctive style.
Her Violin Concerto, however, opens
windows to both older and more
contemporary classical forms, very
much in the style of her tutor in his own
work for the instrument. (Viviane Hagner
(violin), Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal/
Nagano Analekta AN 2 9944)
One of the most accomplished
cadenzas written for Ligeti’s Violin
Concerto was by Thomas Adès (see
‘Three Other Great Recordings’, left),
who went on to compose his own
Violin Concerto. Subtitled ‘Concentric
Paths’, Adès’s work
opens in a similar
way to Ligeti’s and
he also demands
the performer to
play at the extremes
of the instrument’s range. There are
energetic rhythms aplenty in a concerto
that ends with a bang. (Anthony Marwood
(violin), Chamber Orchestra of Europe/Adès
Warner 457 8132)
Ligeti once said that Shostakovich’s
writing for xylophone, where it doubles
the melody, profoundly influenced the
way in which he himself wrote for the
instrument. A prime example of this is
found in the Russian’s Violin Concerto
No. 1, where the xylophone’s hard
movement and the mad, virtuosic
clatter is prominent in the wild second
finale. (Maxim Vengerov (violin), LSO/
Mstislav Rostropovich Teldec 92256)
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 67