Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Piano Concerto (1985-8)
When György Ligeti died in 2006 aged 83, the world lost a musical genius. Despite Stalinist era restrictions, which put a brake on experimention in Eastern Europe, Ligeti emerged, with Lutoslawski, Penderecki and Kurtág, as a composer who forged his own language and influenced following generations.
Having lost members of his family in the Holocaust, Ligeti found it even more impossible to contemplate composing in Hungary after the 1956 crackdown. Like others, he fled to Vienna, and then worked with Stockhausen in Cologne and lectured in Germany (especially Hamburg) and Scandinavia.
His important works began appearing in the late 1950s, and were followed by a flurry of 1960s pieces that are already classics, leading on to the Chamber Concerto, Violin Concerto and Ramifications.
Tonight’s Piano Concerto, premiered in Graz and Vienna, belongs to a slightly later period. This fertile phase began after his opera Le Grand Macabre with the Horn Trio (1982). It was characterised less by massed blocks of sound and hyperactive clusterings (a feature he shared with Lutoslawski) and more by renewed emphasis on music’s traditional elements, including melody. The polytonality or atonality of Ligeti’s earlier works gave way to more of a traditional sense of key.
Ligeti’s substantial orchestra here include three notable features: translucent effects from using just single woodwind; a mind-boggling array of percussion, including crotales, tom-toms, a guiro (an Afro-American notched gourd), flexatone and chromonica, designed for one or two percussionists; and the use of an alto Ocarina, a hauntingly resonating, flute-like Central American instrument.
The concerto, which Ligeti described as "my most complex and difficult score so far" (20 years on, you needn’t be put off by that now!), is in five imaginitively contrasted movements, lasting around four minutes each apart from the slow Lento. Rather than functioning as a traditional concerto instrument, the piano joins in the textures, although not without a few highly effective cadenza-like passages.
The opening Vivace begins mechanically like an excitable perpetuo moto, with audible shades of Bartók. Urgent patterns remind us that Ligeti was interested with the repetitions of Central African music: the result is frenetic yet also attractive. Wood block, temple block and (later) flute-led woodwind join in with abandon: like Ravel’s Piano Concerto or Bolero, it sounds like the apotheosis of the dance, till it all suddenly evaporates.
Linked by a long-held note in double bass, the Lento’s desolate wailings of woodwind, especially ocarina, conjure an atmospheric woodland feeling. Is it owls or wolves, serene or threatening? The piano muses on an important descending pattern in low register; eerie harmonics and blaring brass get added. A shrill climax is reached and a short, uplifting trumpet solo intervenes before final stasis is reached over ocarina and lingering low brass.
Next the soloist intones a cantabile ‘song’ over a woodwind moto perpetuo. Here whole-tone patterns (related to the previous movement’s diatonic version) recall not just Debussy but also the sonorities of Tippett’s piano concerto. Later Bartók presides again (think of The Wooden Prince); and from then on, it’s all helter-skelter till the brief subsidence.
Although marked Allegro, the fourth section is in effect a second slow movement, punctuated by mysterious silences: Messiaen’s chirpy Catalogue des Oiseaux was maybe an influence; while later woodwind and brass eloboration again suggest the wilder decorative filigree of medieval music. The Finale’s ‘luminoso’ again evokes Debussy: despite the activity, the material is fragrant, with saxophone making its own contributions, and piano and brass increasingly violent and insistent before a mini-cadenza and coda-like envoi from everyone heralds the concerto’s sudden, clacking farewell.
© Roderic Dunnet
