After the Xenakis centenary in 2022, the year 2023 is marked by the centenary of the birth of the Hungarian composer György Ligeti. The Bourgie Hall is organizing a Ligeti Festival this weekend. The musicologist Benjamin Levy, professor at the University of California, world specialist in Ligeti, who will kick off with a conference on Saturday at 2:30 p.m., is the guest of the Duty.
“Ligeti has preserved an impact on concert life: orchestral music, chamber music and piano music, and it is therefore not a surprise to me that people have become aware of his centenary”, judges Benjamin Levy, at the eyes of which the Ligeti centenary was worthily celebrated. We also joined him in Vienna, where the opera was presented The great macabre.
Atmospheric
One of the enigmas for us is that little is known about the composer before his emigration to the West in December 1956, after the uprising in Hungary. However, he was already 33 years old at the time. “It’s easy to think that Ligeti did, in fact, ‘start’ in the West. There are pieces lost. He said he sought to compose atmospheric and ethereal pieces before Atmospheres (1961) when he was in Hungary. Only a few sketches remain. There are other pieces linked to the style of the time, socialist-realist. Some have been rediscovered, like a cantata for communist youth, obviously not representative. There were mainly arrangements of folk music in the choral tradition of Zoltán Kodály. And there was this “music for the bottom of drawers”, which he knew would not pass the censorship: the 1er Quartet And Musica ricercata “.
Benjamin Levy agrees with us that we can see Ligeti’s break with tradition in Musica ricercata. “Ligeti goes through several stylistic changes. There are folk-inspired pieces, an inspiration that lay dormant in the middle period and returned at the end. But there is something experimental in Musica ricercata. » In these eleven studies for piano (1951-1953), Ligeti pushes the challenge to the point of composing on a limited number of notes. At first, one or two. From his study articulated on two notes (a semitone), he makes “a stab in the heart of Stalin”. “The experiments on rhythm, registers, tonal colors are foundational for what will follow, but there are phrases or melodies which still cling to the past and from which it will free itself, for example in Atmospheres », Tells us Benjamin Levy.
Ligeti goes through several stylistic changes. There are folk-inspired pieces, an inspiration that lay dormant in the middle period and returned at the end. But there is something experimental in Musica ricercata.
Rather than evoking Stanley Kubrick and his use of Lux Aeterna In 2001. A Space Odysseywe wanted to revive with Benjamin Levy the memory of this evening when Kent Nagano presented the strange Symphonic poem for 100 metronomes. “There’s a lot of ‘performance art’ when you think about the title, the performance instructions that accompanied the work, with the humans leaving the stage to let the machines take control. But Ligeti is interested in machinery before that. In fact, there is an obsession with “demonic clocks”, scenes from the great writer Gyula Krúdy. We find this in Adventures And New Adventures (1962-1964). In all this, there is not only randomness and chaos, but a metaphysical dimension of the countdown, a reminder that death is latent. »
Opera and concertos
For Benjamin Levy, we can establish a connection with opera Great macabre : “There are scenes where the protagonists wait for the end of the world. The moment when Nekrotzar (death) announces the apocalypse, but it turns out that he is a charlatan, or, in any case, for Ligeti he is perhaps simply drunk and doing his job badly… There is almost a self-parody of Ligeti and his obsession with clocks in The great macabre. »
Benjamin Levy sees The great macabre as a “special moment” in Ligeti’s work. “We can talk about a turning point, but there are moments which look towards the past, like the music which illustrates the astronomer and which makes us think of atmospheric music. There is a lot of irony: the astronomer is not a character to be taken seriously. A part of the opera therefore looks towards the past with a sense of self-deprecation. Other parts are looking for other things, which he will then find in the harpsichord pieces, the Threesome with pianoTHE Studies for piano then the Concertos, where there is a new rhythmic vitality, a new approach to melody. »
Benjamin Levy points out to us that Ligeti worked hard, at the end of his life, on an opera about Alice in Wonderland, which he could not complete. The fact that The great macabre remained his only lyrical work is therefore a twist of fate, more than a deliberate choice.
Then came the concertos. ” THE Piano concerto and that for violin are markers of his late period,” recognizes Benjamin Levy. Previously, there was one for cello and a Concerto for flute and oboe, less traditional in a way. ” THE Piano concerto refers to tradition in its virtuosity. What changes is that, for example, in the Cello concerto, the soloist was doing incredibly difficult things with nuance pianississimo,so that we hardly noticed the difficulty. In the Piano concerto, virtuosity responds to what we expect of it. The same goes for the dialogue with the orchestra. »
Another difference: “The style is not only based on Western musical tradition. From the Trio with horn, or roughly 1982, Ligeti immersed himself in world music and African rhythms, studying for example the work of Austrian ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik. There is also his interest in the syncopated rhythms of Balkan dances, particularly dances for wedding celebrations in Bulgaria. This generated a new universe of rhythmic processes, of complex rhythms which do not necessarily relate to the Western classical tradition. »
Concerts
In the eyes of the musicologist, it is important to emphasize that Ligeti does not attempt to evoke or imitate any tradition; it simply incorporates new ideas. “He didn’t operate like Colin McPhee, for example, where you can hear imitated Balinese music. His work is very detailed, but more abstract. »
At Bourgie Hall, three concerts will follow Benjamin Levy’s conference. Saturday at 7 p.m., Jean-Michaël Lavoie, future successor to Lorraine Vaillancourt at the head of the Nouvel Ensemble moderne, will conduct musicians from the OSM, the Conservatory and McGill University and members of the Ligeti Quartet in Ramifications for strings (1968), the Concerto by bedroom (1970), Six bagatelles for wind quintet (1953). Pianist Henry Kramer will join the group for the Trio for violin, horn and piano. Of Chamber concerto, Benjamin Levy says: “We find the obsession with clocks, but with instruments, therefore with gongs. There are very dense canons, where the lines merge almost instantly, and it is the blurring, more than the individual voices, which becomes the substance. It is all the more mastered as Ligeti was, basically, very gifted in counterpoint. »
The Ligeti Quartet will perform on Sunday at 2 p.m. in both Quartets by Ligeti, a creation by his son Lukas Ligeti and Studies for quartet by Nicole Lizée and Ana Sokolovic. “We often called the 1er Quartet of Ligeti Seventh by Bartók, summarizes Benjamin Lévy. Ligeti explores the common ground between folklorism and modernism. THE 2e Quartet is completely post-Hungarian and experimental, with micropolyphony, microtonality. It is Atmospheres applied to chamber music. »
The weekend will conclude with a recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard at 6 p.m., combining Six Studies And Musica ricercata Ligeti threesome Studies by Debussy, three Studies of Chopin and Trifles by Beethoven.