Paul Griffiths
Music's Magic Show
György Ligeti Pieces New and Old
After completing his Violin Concerto, in 1993, György Ligeti spent a while producing only works for a solo instrument: several of his continuing series of Etudes for piano, and the Sonata for unaccompanied viola. Now suddenly he has come out with two pieces on a larger scale. One is the horn concerto he had long been promising to follow the violin's, the other a group of Sándor Weöres settings for mezzo-soprano and four percussionists. These songs had their first performances in November 2000, and were done again when the concerto received its premičre in January. Both works were repeated the next month in London, in delightful and astonishing performances by members of the London Sinfonietta, playing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
The horn concerto—called 'Hamburg Concerto' in honour of the city where it was first heard and where the composer has been living for the last thirty years—resembles the violin and piano concertos in being a succession of bright, offbeat musical conundra, though the movements are generally shorter than before: there are six of them, occupying barely more than a quarter of an hour in total. Also recalled here is Ligeti's Horn Trio, for the concerto is again a study in tuning and in the strange harmonies that can arise when the pure overtones of the natural horn waft into an equal-tempered context. However, the emphasis in the new piece—dated 1998–99 on the score—is much less on the sickliness, dislocation and disintegration of a traditional form, much more on brilliant, colourful, fantastical and fresh imagination.
Apart from the soloist, there are four horn players in the orchestra, all performing on natural instruments, as the soloist does in the second and third movements. The first movement, 'Praeludium', offers an immediate introduction to the horn world: one of Ligeti's characteristic slow-changing clusters, coming from the orchestral horn quartet. The soloist enters this cluster and slowly steps up from it, generating quick figuration that flames through the orchestra. After this, 'Signale, Tanz, Chorale' is a movement in three linked sections scored almost exclusively for the horns, soloist plus quartet.
The third movement also moves through three brief phases, 'Aria, Aksak, Hoketus', all playful, spirited and sly, and the fourth has four: 'Solo, Intermezzo, Mixtur, Kanon'. The solo is, of course, for the soloist, a slow song with microtonal inflections. But in the rest of this movement horn tone is conspicuously absent. The orchestra, excluding horns, makes a break—first in intensive music for strings and side drum, then in a beautifully scored organ-like hymn, then in the prestissimo canon—but cannot quite forget its silent horn-bearing companions. The fifth movement, 'Spectra', is a magical mystery tour of chords, arriving at a brilliant high pile of octaves, fifths and fourths. Then, in 'Capriccio', comes a compact, twitching stopper.
Of the Weöres songs, Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel (2000), there are seven, most of them even shorter than the concerto movements. In them Ligeti responds to the poet, as in previous settings, with a combination of agility, precision, pungent expression and game-playing that seems to match the words, and the effect for Hungarian audiences must be hilarious and wonderful. On the other hand, the composer makes sure his jokes are shared with outsiders. He treats Hungarian almost in the way he treated the nonsense phonemes of his Aventures and Nouvelles aventures in the sixties. The singer in the first song, for instance, is gruff, loud and at the bottom of her register: she is a character—a grumpy peasant, perhaps.
Meanwhile, around her, the percussionists are in on the comedy—and the beauty. The second number is a dance song, a canonic game for voice and chasing marimbas; the third, 'Chinese Temple', combines Chinese-sounding words with the sounds of bells and gongs. The fourth is another rhythmic work-out for the singer and marimbas, while for the fifth the instrumentalists switch to mouth organs. In the sixth one of Ligeti's unplaceable folk songs is beautifully supported by vibraphone and marimba, and there is then a crackling finale.
As he approaches eighty, Ligeti is evidently in fine creative form. Can these new works—delectable, touching and humorous—at least be presages of the second opera he has been wanting to write?
Meanwhile the complete recorded edition, begun by Sony in the late 1990s and abandoned, has been taken up by Teldec as part of its New Line series, with the promise that all five remaining volumes will be out by 2003, the year of the composer's eightieth birthday. Promising in a different sense is the choice of performers. Jonathan Nott and the Berlin Philharmonic will present the big works (not least the Requiem), Reinbert de Leeuw and the Schönberg and ASKO ensembles the smal-ler ones, including those that appear on the first album (New Line 8573 83953-2): Melodien, the Chamber Concerto, the Piano Concerto and Mysteries of the Macabre, an offshoot from the opera Le Grand Macabre given here in its version for trumpet and chamber orchestra.
Only the last (and least) of these is new to the record catalogue. The Chamber Concerto of 1969–70 is a classic, recorded many times, and even the younger Piano Concerto has appeared on record twice before—once with the same soloist as on the new version, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, but with Pierre Boulez conducting the Ensemble InterContemporain. Still, the new performance is so musically lively and expressively rich—and so together—that it has to be heard.
Ligeti completed his Piano Concerto in 1988, at the end of a decade-long process of rethinking how his music might run. The work absorbs a lot of new influences: African drumming (bouncy irregular stresses within regular pulsing), the player-piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow (mad machine music), European folk music revisited (songs and nursery tunes springing out of tonal nowhere and vanishing again). It also exults in a return to creative vivacity.
This is one of music's great comedies and magic shows, full of funny, strange and wonderful feats of imagination: surges of harmony, beautifully orchestrated, that disappear like coloured smoke, textures that get crammed fuller and fuller with raggle-taggle ideas that somehow match perfectly with one another, Ligeti being a master of the chaotic sublime, and rhythms that slip and slide through the mind that tries to get hold of them. It is all, of course, in the timing. Aimard's tempos are very close to those of his earlier recording, but the sense of divergent community is far superior in the new version. The other instruments fit around and with the piano almost as if they were extensions of it. Cues are picked up with alacrity. The dialogue is snappy.
This performance also reaches into the poignancy of the piece. The glorious bustle of the first movement trails away to leave a low string-bass note, ominously sustained. What follows, in the only slow movement of the work's five, is a lament—made with the simplest material, no more than a falling scale, but making that material sound new. The instruments step cautiously in a lonely world, subject to shocks. And what they have to say, in this performance, is haunting and touching. The climax, reached as keenings in the high treble, with the scale now rising, come to a pitch of shimmering intensity, is hair-raising.
A similar fullness of expression makes the performance of Melodien special. Written in 1971, this has always seemed one of Mr Ligeti's most spellbinding pieces, full of textural delight and of melodic lines—hence the title—that branch out and explore. Listening to the score is something like watching a plant grow. And from the perspective of history, the work brilliantly records a moment when western music was beginning to remember its nineteenth-century Romantic past and discover new possibilities in repetitive figuration. Postmodernism and minimalism are here in bud.
Again, De Leeuw's recording is exceptional in its expressive urgency and depth. Lustre of sound goes along with a passionate somberness, celebration with a sense of loss. The performance of the Chamber Concerto, too, is remarkable for its drama and pathos. The music means more than it has perhaps ever done before.
Paul Griffiths
is music critic of The New York Times.
