SUMMARY

The first part of this concert commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of György Ligeti features performances of Melodien, Clocks and Clouds and San Francisco Polyphony, orchestral compositions that are typical representatives of the composer’s style as it underwent a transformation in the 1970s. The striking element of Melodien is the marked presence of melodic lines that seem to appear and vanish at whim, which might have been just as astonishing following on the heels of Ligeti’s work from the ’60s based on static sound arrays (Atmosphères, Lontano) as it was in the context of the defining fashion of the decade. Perhaps also surprising would have been how the dramaturgy, fluidly created from the outlining and blurring of the melodic elements, became easy to follow and experience, and thus effective. This is even more true in the case of Clocks and Clouds, which could also be why Ligeti declared the work to be one of his simplest. The musical fabric of San Francisco Polyphony is shaped by a large number of melodic lines, which are more or less independent of each other in terms of rhythm, tempo and movement. In the second part of the concert, Concerto Budapest and the Hungarian Radio Choir will present the Requiem in partnership with two soloists, Sarah Defrise and Szilvia Vörös, who have both achieved great success as performers of contemporary music. Many have already written about the visionary style, feats of word painting and heart-wrenching density that can be discovered in this extraordinarily complex work. In the Kyrie movement, Jennifer Iverson found that Ligeti combined the language of the two 20th-century masters who influenced him the most: Anton Webern and Béla Bartók, writing, “The Requiem may stand, in some way, as a eulogy for both of these figures,” but also as a turning point, since here Ligeti employs and, in the same time, bids farewell to the compositional techniques he adopted through intensive study of both masters. “A cosmic contrast of great depths and great heights, of minutes full of stillness and moments that gallop, of shouts and whispers, of solitary voices and collective vocal tempests: this work is the music of ecstasy and fear. Its grotesque soundscapes remind us of Hieronymus Bosch. As an acoustic phenomenon, however, this is the sound of the 1960s. And there is something in it that is not exactly Bosch, but which is important and free of cruelty: the Lacrimosa, with its hope of survival. It is a surprising and impressive work of epochal significance,” wrote György Kroó after the piece’s Hungarian première in 1979. Conducting the concert is Péter Eötvös, one of today’s most outstanding creative artists and performers. Although it is as a specialist in cutting-edge music that he gained fame around the world, he is also a pivotal conductor of Stravinsky and Bartók, and few others can claim as much familiarity in interpreting the works of his two elder compatriots György Ligeti and György Kurtág.