Concerts & Tickets
Travels in Eastern Europe - Italian concert
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- Ligeti
Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Ramifications (1969)György (George) Ligeti was one of the giants of the mid-20th century avant-garde. Like his compatriot Bartók, he was born in Transylvania, now part of Romania, in 1923 in the town of Dicsőszentmárton (now Târnava-Sânmărtin, or Tîrnăveni, near Sighişoara).
He came from a Hungarian Jewish family (his surname Ligeti means ‘wood’). When György was aged six, his parents moved to Kolozsvár (Cluj), where he began studying music. Tragedy ensued: during the Second World War the family was broken up and deported to Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Both his father and his brother perished.
He himself was sent to a labour camp. After the war he moved to Hungary’s capital, Budapest, to study with the great composer/teachers Ferenc Farkas and Sándor Veress (and also with Kodály). He taught for several years (1950-56) at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest’s music conservatoire, until the Hungarian Revolution led to his flight in 1956 to first Austria and later Germany (Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg).
During this time Ligeti was composing, both in a more traditional Hungarian folk style (like Kodály), which yielded works such as the Concert Romanesc (also in the SCO’s programme this season) and experimentally, inspired by developments in modern music encouraged by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and at Darmstadt, where he himself taught from 1959 to 1972.
In Vienna his interest was aroused by Serialism, and in Cologne he worked in Stockhausen’s electronic studio. Yet Ligeti never fully espoused either, or indeed any kind of dogma, but rather pursued his own path. The result was a series of major works: Apparitions and Atmosphères (for orchestra); Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures (with solo voices); and his massive choral Requiem.
Tonight’s work belongs, like Lontano, the Chamber Concerto and Second String Quartet, to the late 1960s. Ligeti thereafter somewhat purified and simplified his style, emphasising anew the traditional elements of harmony, rhythm and melody. By contrast, Ramifications, like his earlier experimental works, focuses on his fascination with dense textures and a kind of hyperactivity within them. He himself used the word ‘micropolyphony’, and in ways Ligeti’s music does indeed echo the more elaborate polyphony of medieval composers like Isaac or Josquin des Pres, or even Tallis’s 40-part motet.
Large blocks of sound are built up, often seeming to shift rapidly but in fact changing very slowly, or at other times appearing stately while in fact altering harmonically at great speed. (As with his Russian contemporary Schnittke, ‘polytonality’ might also seem appropriate, for any key allegiances in middle period Ligeti are often tangential, multifarious and varied.
It’s best not to try to ‘follow’, let alone ‘understand’, every note of Ramifications; better, rather, to let the overall effect work on you. Think of its clusterings (like a busy beehive!) as a kind of polyphony: slightly eerie, with shades of electric pylons (Ligeti’s Atmosphères was ‘borrowed’ for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey). The violin rockings, achings and tautness gradually subside and lower strings take over (notice the haunting wind-like sounds ands flurries in the middle strings, not just the pounding double basses). Yet despite all this activity and shifting perspectives, we are still, effectively, in the same place: where we began.
The Hitchcock-like bees return. And (as ‘what goes up must come down’!) we begin descending. Despite all the scurrying, angrier bits, it’s not a bad idea to think of Ramifications as almost prayerful: like a work by (say) Arvo Pärt. That’s certainly what the closing section suggests, with its ethereal harmonics and deep, low double bass, as the violins gradually patter out like rain.
© Roderic Dunnett
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Bassoon Concerto in B flat major, K191 (1774)Allegro
Andante ma adagio
Rondo: Tempo di menuettoThe only surviving bassoon concerto out of at least four composed by Mozart, this droll and delightful work from his early Salzburg years has come to hold a unique place in his output. Nobody knows for whom he composed it, but it catches the moods of the instrument - chortling, morose, whimsical, spry, with an almost schizoid division between its top and bottom registers - to eighteenth-century perfection. It was by no means the first such work ever written. Vivaldi’s output of bassoon concertos (almost forty are listed in the New Grove) was cornucopian, if such a word can be applied to an instrument shaped like a faggot, and Bach, too, recognised its potential for idiosyncratic obbligato roles in his cantatas and other works.
Mozart’s, however, remains the definitive bassoon concerto, unsurpassed by any of its successors - though the Weber and Hummel concertos and Richard Strauss’s exquisite Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon run it close - and characterised by a positively operatic feeling for the instrument’s voice or mixture of voices. This, indeed, is one of the special qualities of Mozart’s concerto, audible not only in its songlike melodies but in its wide solo leaps, typical of the art of opera seria, at which young Mozart (as the teenage composer of the brilliant Mitridate and Lucio Silla) was already adept.
The first movement is particularly rich in these features, and in rapid scale passages that require a sense of humour as well as a virtuoso technique. But such niceties are not achieved at the expense of classical style, and this movement’s spacious, confident opening theme, with its high, whooping horns and the succession of charming subsidiary themes, are choice examples of their kind.
The slow movement, an eloquently wordless foretaste of the Countess’s first aria in The Marriage of Figaro, filled with nocturnal melancholy and designed to be played at a pace slower than andante, sustains the operatic illusion, not least in the soft-grained accompaniment provided by oboes and muted violins. The brief finale, in contrast, is a rondo in the guise of a courtly minuet, its recurring main theme capable of transforming itself in a flash from jollity to something bordering briefly on soft Mozartian sorrow.
© Conrad Wilson
- Bartók
Programme note
Bela Bartók (1881-1945)
Rumanian Folk Dances (1917)Jocul cu bâta (Stick Dance)
Brâul (Sash Dance)
Pe loc (In One Spot)
Buciumeana (Horn Dance)
Poarga Româneasca ( Rumanian Polka)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)In the early 1900s, Bartók came to realise that what had until then generally passed as Hungarian folk music was actually the rather romanticised collection of gypsy melodies that Brahms, Liszt and others had altered and arranged. The real folk music of Hungary, he discovered, had a harder texture, was cruder in technique, more severe in line and more austere in spirit. These melodies, generally written in modal scales, had an exotic character and irregular rhythms. Together with Zoltán Kodáy, he set about systematically collecting and analysing the folk music of Hungary in expeditions that took them from the Carpathian mountains to the Adriatic, and from western Slovakia to the Black Sea. This collaboration resulted in the unearthing of several thousand folk songs and dances eventually published in twelve monumental volumes. Initially, they jotted down melodies by hand, but later began to use Edison cylinders to record songs and dances. Bartók was particularly drawn to Rumanian folk traditions because he felt that these had been more isolated from outside influences and were therefore more authentic. He also attracted the variety and colours of instruments used in Rumanian music: violins, peasant flutes (panpipes), guitars, and bagpipes.
Bartók later acknowledged how deeply he was influenced by the folk material he had collected: “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of the freest and most varied rhythmic phrases and changes of tempi. It became clear to me that the old modes, which had been forgotten in our music, had lost nothing of their vigour. Their new employment made new rhythmic combinations possible.”
Although the outbreak of war restricted his travels, it was during this time that Bartók began to make various settings of some of the folk songs and dances he had collected. He originally wrote the Rumanian Folk Dances for piano, but in 1917 he arranged them for a small orchestra. Their popularity is evident in the numerous other arrangements that have been made, notably for string orchestra (by Arthur Willner), salon orchestra, and violin and piano.
Bartók was convinced that the folk art that he had helped to discover could, as he said, “serve as the foundations for a renaissance of Hungarian art music.” These seven dances, which vary greatly in character and tempo, are played without a break, the last three forming a coda of increasing energy and excitement.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague (1786)Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Finale - PrestoThough Mozart’s European travels never brought him to Scotland, he did reach London in his childhood and during his adult years he went more than once to Prague – one of his journeys being fascinatingly chronicled by Eduard Morike in a short novel on the subject. In Prague, Mozart was more appreciated than in his native Salzburg or adopted Vienna. The Marriage of Figaro, which failed to please the Viennese in 1786, was a smash hit when it reached the Bohemian capital later that year. When Mozart arrived in Prague in January 1787 he reported that “here they talk about nothing but Figaro; nothing is played or sung or whistled but Figaro, nothing, nothing but Figaro”. It was the Prague Opera which commissioned him to write Don Giovanni, and it was for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia that he later composed La Clemenza di Tito. As for the Symphony No 38 in D, though it was written in Vienna, it had what was almost certainly its premiere at a concert during Mozart’s visit to Prague in January 1787, when his mind must already have been reaching towards Don Giovanni – the two works share the same key, and the slow dramatic introduction to the symphony contains more than a whiff of the opera to come.
Mozart’s last three symphonies (Nos 39-41) are widely held to represent the high watermark of his achievement in the form, but their immediate predecessor is equally great. It is a work of profound animation, radiance and tension, its three movements being so self-sufficient that Mozart felt able to dispense with the inclusion of a minuet. The big introduction to the first movement is balanced by an intricately wrought Allegro – “saturated with polyphony”, as Einstein eloquently put it – grand and gracious in design, with a theme that was later to appear in a different guise as the fugato of The Magic Flute overture. In the Andante the writing remains contrapuntal, and the stabbing discords and chromaticisms give the music an intensity not found in Mozart’s previous symphonic slow movements. After this the final Presto may seem disconcertingly brief, but its taut rhythms and concentrated layout make it a match for the other movements, especially if the exposition repeat is included, as Mozart wanted.
© Conrad Wilson
- bassoon
- conductor
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati directs a programme of Ligeti, Mozart and Bartók in the magnificent surroundings of Turin's great Lingotto concert hall. He is joined by SCO Principal Bassoon Peter Whelan for Mozart's Bassoon Concerto.
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