This weekend, Bourgie Hall organized a mini-festival dedicated to György Ligeti on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. The inaugural concert of the series, Saturday, revealed several facets of the composer’s palette in excellent artistic quality.
The Bourgie Hall’s initiative to organize a Ligeti weekend was welcomed by the public. There was Saturday evening, for the first concert of the series, which also included, on Sunday, a recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the presentation of Quartets by the Ligeti Quartet, as many spectators as for Christian Blackshaw’s Mozart concert, two days previously.
Quartet to the rescue
It is true that the formula “panorama of the work” multiplying the configurations (chamber orchestra, wind ensemble, trio) was very clever for getting an idea of the composer. Unfortunately for the organizers, a grain of sand came to disrupt the beautiful program, since an indisposition of one of the musicians of the Trio with horn brought a change of program on Saturday.
The members of the Ligeti Quartet compensated for this, and the modification was very interesting, because, by playing Andante and Allegretto, they made us hear an early work by a student Ligeti (1950), that is to say this music that we do not know or know very little, and towards which we do not go at all, in a natural way, when we interested in the “contemporary” career of the creator. But it is always fascinating to see where we start from. This post-Kodály Hungarian breeding ground is even more palpable in Ballad and Dance for 2 violins from the same year, with a very folklorizing spirit. Change for less “essential” works, therefore, but very instructive.
More disconcerting: the first movement of the Viola Sonata. Titled Hora lungă and played on a single string, it uses microtonal intervals, which means that we don’t really know, in the 2e half, if the instrumentalist really played out of tune or if the work was done that way. Listening again to Antoine Tamestit’s recording confirms that the work, formidable, was not at issue in what we heard. Let’s recognize that it was courageous for Richard Jones to face this head-on.
Rhythms and atmospheres
The concert concluded with Six Trifles for wind quintet from 1953 by the OSM instrumentalists in brilliant form. This work was very important in this program since it is an adaptation of six of the movements of Musica Ricercataa “founding” work, in a way, by Ligeti.
The rhythmic division and the quality (and differentiation) of articulation, essences of the project, were impeccable, as was the “incarnation” of the timbres, the subject of the transcription. The musicians were at ease in the twirling movements (I, IV), the more linked and contrasting episodes (II, V) with all the necessary humor (bassoon).
In the first part, Jean-Michaël Lavoie, future director of the NEM, successively directed a group of students in Ramifications and musicians from the OSM in the essentials Kammerkonzert. We are here, at the end of the sixties, in another universe. Ramifications (version for strings) is far from rhythmic studies, but rather in layers, strata and a blurring which aims at both the musical continuum (what rhythm?) and the distinction that the listener makes of the sound (there is two groups tuned differently). We could say that we are here in the register of atmospheric music through acoustic phenomena.
Jean-Michaël Lavoie obtained a lot of subtlety from the young musicians in a precisely spidery speech, just as he knew how to take advantage of all the qualities (beauty of timbres, precision) of those of the OSM to broaden the entire palette sound of Chamber concertothe juxtaposition of the two scores being a perfect idea.