[ad_1]
György Ligeti’s wild, radiantly paradoxical Violin Concerto has captured the creativeness like few different modernist works of the final 30 – even 50 – years. The piece was composed between 1989 and ’93 for the German violinist Saschko Gawriloff.
Initially in three actions, it was premiered in that type by Gawriloff and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra below conductor Gary Bertini in 1990. Ligeti then revised the primary motion and added an additional two – a model premiered by Gawriloff in 1992 with Ensemble Trendy, carried out by Peter Eötvös. Subsequent re-orchestration of the third and fourth actions produced the definitive, five-movement work heard right this moment.
The rigorous composition course of was attribute of Ligeti. Within the 1990 programme booklet he wrote: ‘I compose very slowly, destroying ten or 20 makes an attempt earlier than attaining the ultimate rating … the creation of artwork shouldn’t be an on a regular basis process and I need to obtain, with out compromise, the top end result which is my imagined excellent.’
A information to the music of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto
He was 66 when he started the concerto, and lengthy recognised as certainly one of Europe’s biggest dwelling composers. He was additionally a robust individualist who had come to occupy a novel place on the core, and but sceptical, of the avant garde – a seeming contradiction that his Violin Concerto richly encapsulates whereas transcending in its Bartókian enchantment. Filled with outlandish timbres, abrupt swerves and expressive extremes, the piece is a unprecedented feat of creativeness – and it requires simply that from its virtuoso soloist, conductor and 22-piece chamber orchestra.
Certainly, each participant turns into a soloist as Ligeti attracts on a kaleidoscope of sounds and methods: from medieval hocket to renaissance ostinato and Baroque chorale; Jap European folksong to Congolese polyrhythm; Romantic lyricism and modal tonality to complicated dissonance and untempered tunings; ethereal dreamworlds to profound melancholy and surreal humour; typically all of sudden, and saturated with an underlying ambivalence.
With self-borrowing thrown into the combination (there’s a melody from his 1951-3 Musica ricercata, for example), all of it quantities to a digital compression of Ligeti’s profession inside one brilliantly taut piece. A number of contrasts should not merely juxtaposed, nonetheless, however built-in throughout the context of latest discoveries in methods quietly as radical as these he pioneered in earlier years.
Within the Nineteen Sixties, colour-packed works such because the Lux aeterna (1966) – famously purloined by movie director Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Area Odyssey – had established Ligeti on the vanguard of recent methods and soundworlds.
Nonetheless, whereas friends like Stockhausen and Boulez craved freedom from the previous, Ligeti discovered himself looking for freedom from the orthodoxy they themselves got here to characterize. An exile from Soviet-dominated Hungary, he loathed dogma and in the end refused to reject a heritage that included diatonicism and indigenous traditions.
But Ligeti was additionally removed from the nostalgic that some listening to his Brahms-dedicated Horn Trio in 1982 feared he may need develop into. Quite the opposite, he was pushed by a modernist impulse to interrogate the previous by means of the current and vice versa. This he did with nice curiosity and talent, savouring ‘irregularities’ and the ‘disorganised’, as he put it, from inside ‘a algorithm enough to the thought’. Tellingly, he famous of his Piano Etudes: ‘In my music, one finds neither that which one would possibly name the “scientific” nor the “mathematical”; however quite a unification of building with poetic, emotional creativeness.’
The Violin Concerto splendidly showcases these ideas. Ligeti was a lot taken by Nineteen Eighties theories of chaos and fractal arithmetic, and the piece displays a corresponding, nearly synaesthetic fascination with color, sample and type. Incorporating historical and non-Western microtonality, an orchestral violinist and violist tune their devices to an ‘out of tune’ pure harmonic from the double bass, creating an eerie impact heightened by pure horns and wobbly ocarinas.
Equally, complicated matrices impressed by the invention of Conlon Nancarrow’s participant piano research, and of ‘marvellous, polyphonic, polyrhythmic’ African music, push uneven folks tunes and counterpoint into sudden realms throughout bars and polymetres, creating dense but intricate, risky textures.
By and above all this the soloist soars, skitters and laments in methods which are as unleashed as they’re in the end grounded in acquainted concerto traditions. With co-creative spirit, Ligeti invitations the participant to compose their very own closing cadenza in the event that they so want, or carry out the one initially written by Gawriloff utilizing discarded early materials.
The most effective recordings of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)
Ensemble Trendy/Peter Eötvös
Naive V5285
The celebrities fairly merely align on this stupendous 2012 recording by Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja with Ensemble Trendy and Peter Eötvös – the ensemble and conductor who had premiered the five-movement Violin Concerto in 1992.
In fact, the soloist then was Ligeti’s dedicatee, Saschko Gawriloff, whose subsequent premiere recording with Ensemble InterContemporain and Pierre Boulez continues to set an eloquently excessive bar. However Kopatchinskaja takes issues into altogether new dimensions, conjuring a efficiency that feels wrought from her very nerves and sinew.
Extra like this
Splendidly exact and managed, she and the ensemble nonetheless handle to convey the sense of spontaneity and danger inherent in a rating stuffed with startling gestures and strange sounds. The result’s a type of transitional house during which technical brilliance and playful theatricality exist to serve mercurial, deeply felt feelings. Crucially, this underlines the distinctly japanese European sensibility from which the concerto springs: the place microtones and sophisticated cross-rhythms are typically a part of music’s expressive material – and the place folks traditions should not simply a part of historical past, however a lived actuality.
Within the Praeludium, Kopatchinskaja’s preliminary, open-fifth arpeggios are blurred with explicit immediacy by ‘mis-tunings’ because the ensemble joins her, indicating the simultaneous rigidity and enchantment to come back. Ligeti described the character of this primary motion as ‘glassy, shimmering’ and its diaphanous harmonics as ‘the expression of fragility and hazard’. And so it exquisitely proves, resulting in a second motion Aria – Hoquetus – Choral wealthy with the molten craving of its central folks melody.
The motion scheme of the concerto is broadly fast-slow-fast-slow-fast, and Kopatchinskaja and Eötvös create a ferocious depth that hyperlinks every to the opposite, maximising Ligeti’s excessive dynamics and articulation whereas making sense of sudden interruptions and hiatuses on the very brink of disintegration.
A macabrely spectral Intermezzo turns into a helter-skelter experience from which the Passacaglia calmly unfolds. However most astonishing is how each contradictory side of Ligeti’s invention is gathered into the ultimate Appassionato. The cadenza is Kopatchinskaja’s personal, an outpouring of unbridled virtuosity that celebrates like no different this passionately enigmatic work.
Frank Peter Zimmermann (violin)
Teldec 8573876312
Zimmermann’s masterly rendition was recorded in 2002 below the composer’s watch. Conductor Reinbert de Leeuw and the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble create sublimely balanced sonorities by means of which the violin sings with supple magnificence and an unerring sense of objective and path. Ligeti’s extremes of tessitura – ultra-high horns, piccolo and percussion contrasting laconic low flutes, cellos and clarinets – are delivered with unrivalled otherworldly readability. The ensuing tensions are thrillingly pushed to the bounds of bearability.
Jeanne-Marie Conquer (violin)
Alpha ALPHA217
Brilliantly teamed with Ensemble InterContemporain and Matthias Pintscher, Conquer’s 2015 disc brings wealthy heat and resonance, allied with adventurous spirit. Contrasting modes of assault are thoughtfully, edgily delivered, conveying the impression, for instance, of the violin grappling for a maintain inside a skittering Aria – Hoquetus – Choral. The following, embattled Intermezzo provides strategy to a compellingly schizoid Passacaglia and Appassionato, the power nearly however not fairly carried by means of into the cadenza. Nonetheless, the harmonics listed below are exquisitely unsettling.
Augustin Hadelich (violin)
Warner 9029551045
Supported by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Hadelich delivers a passionate, extremely private account. Combining swashbuckling drama with whistling insouciance, he locates the off-kilter serenity in Ligeti’s chromatic lyricism, discovering methods by means of beneficiant glissandos and vibrato to an elastic but targeted sense of pitch and rhythm. The principal curiosity of this 2019 recording, although, is Thomas Adès’s cadenza: a homage to Ligeti that’s directly touching, urbane and splendidly absurd.
And one to keep away from…
There are a lot of beguiling elements to this 2000 recording from Christina Åstrand with the Danish Nationwide Radio Symphony Orchestra, not least their daring enjoyment of the spectral smudge afforded by Ligeti’s non-tempered tunings, lotus flutes and ocarinas. However the general conception doesn’t fairly come collectively, and a few curiously executed ensemble does nothing to dispel the impression of a patchwork
of textures.
[ad_2]