György Ligeti (1923-2006)

Started by bhodges, April 06, 2007, 06:55:57 AM

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Quote from: orfeo on September 06, 2012, 07:49:11 PM
Right. So now they're "much better performances".  Got it.

If you've actually read my posts to you, I've been saying this all along. YES, they're much better performances. Duh!

snyprrr

I listened to Ramifications, the Chamber Concerto, and Melodien (all DG),... oh, and the 10 wind pieces.

I'm finding some Ligeti just annoying to the ears at this post-Post Modern phase, but I heartily enjoyed the Chamber Concerto. And, sure, I like the other Concertos just fine, and other things,.. but I find I can only listen to Ligeti in doses. And... he has such a small quantity of music, dense as it is.

I almost cracked open the Arditti/Sony that I've had for years. Not yet! ::)

Mirror Image

Quote from: snyprrr on September 06, 2012, 08:39:03 PM
I listened to Ramifications, the Chamber Concerto, and Melodien (all DG),... oh, and the 10 wind pieces.

I'm finding some Ligeti just annoying to the ears at this post-Post Modern phase, but I heartily enjoyed the Chamber Concerto. And, sure, I like the other Concertos just fine, and other things,.. but I find I can only listen to Ligeti in doses. And... he has such a small quantity of music, dense as it is.

I almost cracked open the Arditti/Sony that I've had for years. Not yet! ::)

The Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto, Melodien, Atmospheres, Clocks & Clouds, Lontano, and the Requiem are the main reasons I continue coming back to Ligeti. There are many works by him that do nothing for me. I don't like his Chamber Concerto or the Cello Concerto at all. I think those two pieces fail as they don't contain any accessible points of entry for me. They sound like one huge wash of noise, but the works I mentioned give Ligeti high marks for me. An enjoyable composer and certainly one of the few late 20th Century composers I can actually get into without getting out some kind of earplug. 8)

DavidW

Quote from: James on September 22, 2012, 03:00:31 PM
Coming September 25th ..

[asin]B008P76XCY[/asin]


Finally!!  I can watch this opera, I will be ordering this, thanks James for the find! :)

not edward

An intriguing nugget of information tucked away in Ondine's recent Reger violin concerto issue:

QuoteIn 2013, Ondine will release Ligeti's violin concerto with Benjamin Schmid.

I can see Schmid doing particularly exciting things with this concerto (though Tetzlaff still needs to make a recording).
"I don't at all mind actively disliking a piece of contemporary music, but in order to feel happy about it I must consciously understand why I dislike it. Otherwise it remains in my mind as unfinished business."
-- Aaron Copland, The Pleasures of Music

not edward

Also on the Ligeti front, a new 2CD set with Patricia Kopatchinskaja playing the Ligeti violin concerto alongside Bartok's second and the first recording of Eotvos' recent violin concerto Seven.

The Guardian asked her to nominate her favourite 20th century work:

QuoteLigeti's Violin Concerto is the best violin concerto after Beethoven. Ligeti is one of the most impressive figures of recent times. Like a scientist in a laboratory, he never did anything routinely, but for every single piece he invented new methods and solutions. While his fellow Hungarian Bartók used the eastern European folklore as material and inspiration, Ligeti uses anything he can find – for example, in the violin concerto there are several okarinas, instruments that are more than 10,000 years old. He wants them deliberately out-of-tune, which produces an exhilarating effect. He also uses elements of the Notre-Dame choir school of the 12th century, Hungarian folk melodies and complex Bulgarian rhythms. The orchestra consists of only two dozen musicians, but they do not provide just an accompaniment – everybody is challenged to their musical and technical limits, as is the soloist. This might sound very intellectual, but Ligeti is like a child at play, with humour, cheekiness and temper tantrums. And if everybody meets the challenge, this concerto becomes a big spaceship: complicated, luminous and nonsensical, taking off and flying to Neverland.

Perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but it is one hell of a piece IMO.

(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/nov/29/rest-is-noise-festival-favourites )
"I don't at all mind actively disliking a piece of contemporary music, but in order to feel happy about it I must consciously understand why I dislike it. Otherwise it remains in my mind as unfinished business."
-- Aaron Copland, The Pleasures of Music

lescamil

I have that recent Kopatchinskaja set, and I love every minute of the set, except when she substitutes her own cadenza instead of using Gawriloff's excellent one, which appears in Ligeti's score, with his approval. Her cadenza seems to lose the spirit of the piece and doesn't really fit. Other than that, she does a masterful job with the work. Eötvös's conducting is great, also. Eötvös's own violin concerto 'Seven' is also a great work to listen to! I'm not sure if it's a major new violin concerto in the repertoire, but it has a lot of great moments, especially the frequent interactions between violin and the various forms of percussion he uses, not unlike Ligeti.
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bhodges

Quote from: edward on November 15, 2012, 06:12:39 AM
(though Tetzlaff still needs to make a recording)

100% agree - why hasn't this happened already!

And thanks for the quote from Kopatchinskaja (new to me) about the piece. Yes, a bit over-the-top, but a joy to read comments from someone who adores the work so much. Not sure that I've thought about the "best violin concerto after Beethoven," but...hm... :-\...this one could be it.

Quote from: lescamil on November 29, 2012, 01:50:19 PM
I have that recent Kopatchinskaja set, and I love every minute of the set, except when she substitutes her own cadenza instead of using Gawriloff's excellent one, which appears in Ligeti's score, with his approval. Her cadenza seems to lose the spirit of the piece and doesn't really fit. Other than that, she does a masterful job with the work. Eötvös's conducting is great, also. Eötvös's own violin concerto 'Seven' is also a great work to listen to! I'm not sure if it's a major new violin concerto in the repertoire, but it has a lot of great moments, especially the frequent interactions between violin and the various forms of percussion he uses, not unlike Ligeti.

And thanks for that info, too (and on Eötvös, whose work I like, also). I'd actually be curious to hear her Ligeti cadenza, even if it doesn't quite work. In 2005 I heard Jennifer Koh do the piece (IIRC the only version I've heard other than Tetzlaff) and she used a new cadenza by John Zorn - recall liking it, but only heard it the single time. The Gawriloff sets a very high bar.

--Bruce

not edward

#348
Quote from: Brewski on November 29, 2012, 01:58:48 PM
The Gawriloff sets a very high bar.
Agreed; it of course also has the advantage of being based at least partially on otherwise-unknown Ligeti (though I don't know exactly how much of it comes from the original first movement of the concerto).

There's at least one other cadenza, by Barnabas Keleman, written for when he gave the Hungarian premiere of the work (while still a student at the Franz Liszt Academy). I've heard him play the work with his own cadenza once--it's in some ways more conventional as it recaps the material from all five movements while also being less so as it includes the violinist singing in dialogue with his playing--and would be interested to hear a recording.

One thing I keep wondering is whether there are any bootlegs floating around of the original three-movement version of the concerto. It'd be interesting to hear what the rejected first movement sounds like (I've seen more than one review of the work complain that the replacement first movement was grossly inferior to the original).
"I don't at all mind actively disliking a piece of contemporary music, but in order to feel happy about it I must consciously understand why I dislike it. Otherwise it remains in my mind as unfinished business."
-- Aaron Copland, The Pleasures of Music

lescamil

Quote from: edward on November 29, 2012, 03:33:52 PM
it includes the violinist singing in dialogue with his playing--and would be interested to hear a recording.

This also occurs in Kopatchinskaja's cadenza, something which was a better part of the cadenza, but I thought it was unsuccessful overall as a cadenza.
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Archaic Torso of Apollo

Re: cadenzas

I heard Tetzlaff play the VC in Carnegie Hall in 2000, and what I remember is that he based it on that long winding melody that appears in the second (I think) movement. The tune seems to be a favorite of Ligeti: he used it in Musica ricercata and in the woodwind 5tet arrangement of some of its sections. I was slightly disappointed when I then got Gawriloff's recording and didn't hear that tune at the end.
formerly VELIMIR (before that, Spitvalve)

"Who knows not strict counterpoint, lives and dies an ignoramus" - CPE Bach

snyprrr

Quote from: James on April 21, 2013, 05:03:27 AM
Susteck is on a roll under Wergo .. Stockhausen, Rihm and now ..

[asin]B00BZSUL64[/asin]
composer: György Ligeti - Dominik Susteck
interpreter: Dominik Susteck
booklet writer: Ingo Dorfmüller
Dominik Susteck: organ

Although György Ligeti composed only three works for the organ – "Volumina", "Harmonies", and "Coulée" – these pieces mark significant stages in the course of his compositional development; more importantly, they revolutionized the world of organ music and provided the initial spark for an entire wave of New Music for the organ.

"Volumina" completely dispenses with the parameters normally used to structure time in a musical work, such as melody, rhythm, and harmony. The only active structural parameter in this music is the tone colour. The music is perceived more in a spatial than a temporal sense, with the title "Volumina" referring to differently dimensioned "stationary" sound spaces.

The two études "Harmonies" and "Coulée" take up and vary the idea of a stationary sound space: ,,Harmonies" unfolds as an unbroken chain of ten-note chords; only one note is changed from one chord to the next. The tone colour, however, changes more often, with almost imperceptible continuous transitions. "Coulée" is a chain of extremely fast quavers which describe a slow harmonic progression, giving it a kind of trembling and buzzing motion: "So that the individual notes can no longer be distinguished: the motion almost melts into a continuum." (Ligeti)

In the eleven-movement piano cycle "Musica ricercata" Ligeti explores the possibilities of using the twelve chromatic semitones for composition: Starting with the repetition and octave transposition of a single note, each of the following pieces works with a tonal vocabulary expanded by one note each, with the intervallic relationships changing from piece to piece. One of the movements was arranged for the organ by Ligeti himself; the others have been arranged by the organist Dominik Susteck.

Susteck, who performed and recorded these works on the organ of Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne, also presents on this CD an original composition: his organ improvisations "Sprachsignale" which are inspired by Ligeti's piece "Artikulation".

coproduction with Deutschlandradio

Content:
György Ligeti
Musica ricercata per pianoforte (1951–53), arranged for organ by Dominik Susteck (2012)
Two Etudes for organ (1967/69)
Volumina for organ (1961/62, rev. 1966)


Dominik Susteck
Sprachsignale. Improvisations for organ (2012)

http://www.wergo.de/shop/resources/721135.pdf


What? Is it a cozy 39mins.???????

snyprrr

Concerto for Violincello
Double Concerto


Lontano
Ramifications
Chamber Symphony
Melodien


Actually, these two works are both in two contrasting movements. Though all the pieces share similar concerns, I thought I would concentrate on these two.

The CC is certainly the most modern sounding CC up to that point. The first movement is in Ligeti's 'slack' style, whilst the second is in his 'agitated' mode. There is some of the Feldman (to come later) feel in the way Ligeti milks the falling semi-tone, but, there is so much going on here, it certainly is more than just a simple concerto. It does remind one a bit of BA Zimmermann's latter CC, with stylistic clashes (no post-modern quotations here I think). The pieces ends with a grating feedback solo for the cello, a wonderful rock-n-roll moment. Except for Ligeti's penchant for dynamics so low I can't hear anything, this CC is a tonic for these weary modern ears.

The Double Concerto seemed very similar, but the voltage seems to simmer in the mid-range here. There is a bit of the Xenakis blending of tones, which, of course, Ligeti is ALSO known  for! I had a much harder time hearing the music here, and I really didn't want to turn it up too loud. I was perplexed by this piece's apparent aimlessness, even as it followed the earlier piece to a tee.

Anyhow, what do you think of these two pieces?

snyprrr

Quote from: James on June 07, 2013, 06:27:36 AM
The Keller Quartetts association with ECM has yielded outstanding recordings, among them Bachs Art of the Fugue, Shostakovichs String Quartet No. 15 and works by the ensembles mentor, Gyorgy Kurtag.

This newest release is another remarkable addition to the Budapest-based groups discography; the album bridges musical worlds in a way that would have been difficult to imagine just a few decades ago, as it juxtaposes works by two seeming antipodes of 20th-century music: American romanticist Samuel Barber (1910-81) and post-war Hungarian modernist Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006).

Ligetis two string quartets are bracing creations of the 1950s and 60s that like the quartets of his great precursor, Bartok are as mysterious as they are earthy. Between these two works appears the slow movement from Barbers String Quartet of 1936, a slice of tonal terra firma between the restlessly shifting, even dizzying sounds of the Ligeti. Barber later orchestrated this slow movement, turning it into his famous Adagio for Strings a work that, after its premiere by Toscanini in 1938, would serve as musical catharsis for occasions of great mourning. The aesthetic distance between Barber and Ligeti is compressed not only by the passing of time but by the keen interpretive perceptiveness of the Keller Quartett. The group finds common contours in these pieces, spirits that are kindred. Here, the Ligeti has an expressiveness that is moving; the Barber, played with sparing vibrato, sounds strangely unfamiliar, ghostly, unsettling.

The CD booklet for this album includes an insightful essay by Paul Griffiths. Underscoring the startling juxtaposition of the Ligeti and the Barber, he points out that the Romantic tradition was home for Barber, and home was for him a place to cherish. For Ligeti whose father and brother were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, and whose hometown of Budapest was the scene of a Soviet crackdown in 1956, the year he escaped to the West home was a place to leave, whether that home was geographical or musical.

This title will be released on July 23, 2013

[asin]B00BY1F996[/asin]


"The Keller's next release will pair Stockhausen and Tchaikovsky."

not edward

Really odd choice; I don't see any way the two works can illuminate each other, particularly with them not even playing the whole Barber.

Given how good the Kellers' Kurtag disc was, it would've made a lot more sense to pair the Ligeti with the pieces for string quartet Kurtag's written since that disc was issued.
"I don't at all mind actively disliking a piece of contemporary music, but in order to feel happy about it I must consciously understand why I dislike it. Otherwise it remains in my mind as unfinished business."
-- Aaron Copland, The Pleasures of Music

Pessoa

Quote from: edward on April 15, 2012, 06:35:14 PM
Yes. Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel, which though not major Ligeti retains the imagination and magic of his best works.
How true, what a delightful work.

EigenUser

Beethoven's Op. 133 -- A fugue so bad that even Beethoven himself called it "Grosse".

Mirror Image

Quote from: EigenUser on February 12, 2014, 07:36:12 PM
Here's an interesting interview (in English!) with Ligeti:
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNFq6HIlMEc
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEuUM6hAcDY

I've seen this interview before. I'd love just to have had 15 minutes talking with him. He seems like such a down-to-earth, mellow person.

EigenUser

#358
Yes, I agree. I feel similarly about Bartok, though there aren't too many good resources like these since he was earlier (a couple of radio interviews, I think).

For me, the pieces that really sum up his brilliance and diversity are

1. Clocks and Clouds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyO7c6U5dEw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3jcZy-HGH0

2. San Francisco Polyphony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IklGo9CQ5o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uk8iDfB47g

3. Piano Concerto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5SJDLkE7Tg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiAmhiB2-fs

"San Francisco Polyphony" is such a great tone-poem of a colorful, vibrant, busy city. The first few minutes of the work give me the impression of watching the morning rush-hour from a second-story window of an apartment. He has these lyrical melodic figurations emerge from the crowd, only to pass on and fade back. This goes on for a bit -- and then the fog sets in...
Beethoven's Op. 133 -- A fugue so bad that even Beethoven himself called it "Grosse".

Mirror Image

#359
Quote from: EigenUser on February 13, 2014, 06:37:19 PM
Yes, I agree. I feel similarly about Bartok, though there aren't too many good resources like these since he was earlier (a couple of radio interviews, I think).

For me, the pieces that really sum up his brilliance and diversity are

1. Clocks and Clouds
http://www.youtube.com/v/SyO7c6U5dEw http://www.youtube.com/v/-3jcZy-HGH0

2. San Francisco Polyphony
http://www.youtube.com/v/3IklGo9CQ5o http://www.youtube.com/v/6uk8iDfB47g

3. Piano Concerto
http://www.youtube.com/v/L5SJDLkE7Tg http://www.youtube.com/v/LiAmhiB2-fs

"San Francisco Polyphony" is such a great tone-poem of a colorful, vibrant, busy city. The first few minutes of the work give me the impression of watching the morning rush-hour from a second-story window of an apartment. He has these lyrical melodic figurations emerge from the crowd, only to pass on and fade back. This goes on for a bit -- and then the fog sets in...

There we go. Now people can view the videos. :D All you have to do is replace the = with a / and delete watch? within the link.