The Daily Telegraph - Features
Young musicians rise to Ligeti’s challenge
Ligeti Day
Aldeburgh Festival ★★★★★
Think twice before you offer your audience challenging modern music. If you must do it make sure it’s in small doses and sweetened with something nice, if you want to avoid the accusation of elitism.
These are the mantras of our cultural masters in government, which thank goodness the Aldeburgh Festival ignores. The splendid defiance of the zeitgeist manifested in the two concerts given on Friday, offering the complete music for strings by the great Hungarian modernist György Ligeti (who would now be 100 years old) was one of their most pleasurable aspects.
But of course it was Ligeti’s fabulously inventive music, light-footed even when dark, which won our hearts and minds. Normally we hear Ligeti’s mature works from the 1960s onwards in isolation, which can make it seem as if his music dropped from the sky fully formed in all its glacial purity, delicate tracery and sudden brutal pratfalls. Here we heard them in the context of the music he composed in the 1940s and 1950s, before his nighttime escape from communist Hungary.
At that time Ligeti’s musical god was his great Hungarian forebear Béla Bartók, and it was touching to hear Ligeti call on the same lilting Hungarian and Romanian folk melodies that Bartók had used. But here and there you could spot glimpses of the composer Ligeti would later become. At the end of the Baladă şi joc (Ballad and Dance) for two violins from 1950 the music magically dematerialised in a way that was pure Ligeti.
All this meant the later pieces like the String Quartet no2 of 1968 took on a moving human quality, because we understood where they came from. That quality shone out in the performances by the Ligeti Quartet. To expect these four young musicians to then play a third concert containing 15 brand-new two-minute quartets, composed in homage to one of Ligeti’s 18 piano études, seems not far from sadism. But they rose to the challenge with smiling, foot-stamping aplomb.
Many of these new pieces strove often successfully to capture something of Ligeti’s lightningfast, scurrying sound-world, but the ones that caught my ear were those that imagined very unLigeti-like sounds. Among them were Sidney Corbett’s Suspended Disbelief, a touching evocation of Ligeti’s jazz mode, and Elliot Galvin’s Hungarian Metal, which translated the dancing original into a contemporary club world. It was a delightful 75 minutes, which proved that, though Ligeti has departed, his benign fructifying spirit is still in the air.