{"id":39479,"date":"2024-02-23T15:29:42","date_gmt":"2024-02-23T14:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/64fcd165-66c7-497c-b2d5-dee1ee895aa6"},"modified":"2024-02-23T16:50:46","modified_gmt":"2024-02-23T15:50:46","slug":"ligetis-violin-concerto-how-it-was-written-and-its-best-recordings","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/rss_feed\/ligetis-violin-concerto-how-it-was-written-and-its-best-recordings\/","title":{"rendered":"Ligeti\u2019s Violin Concerto: how it was written and its best recordings"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>

By Steph Power\n <\/p>

Published: Friday, 23 February 2024 at 14:29 PM<\/p>

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Gy\u00f6rgy Ligeti\u2019s wild, radiantly paradoxical Violin Concerto has captured the imagination like few other modernist works of the last 30 \u2013 even 50 \u2013 years. The piece was composed between 1989 and \u201993 for the German violinist Saschko Gawriloff. <\/strong><\/p>

Initially in three movements, it was premiered in that form by Gawriloff and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra under conductor Gary Bertini in 1990. Ligeti<\/a> <\/strong>then revised the first movement and added a further two \u2013 a version premiered by Gawriloff in 1992 with Ensemble Modern, conducted by Peter E\u00f6tv\u00f6s. Subsequent re-orchestration of the third and fourth movements produced the definitive, five-movement work heard today.<\/p>

The rigorous composition process was characteristic of Ligeti. In the 1990 programme booklet he wrote: \u2018I compose very slowly, destroying ten or 20 attempts before attaining the final score \u2026 the creation of art is not an everyday task and I must achieve, without compromise, the end result which is my imagined ideal.\u2019<\/p>

A guide to the music of Ligeti\u2019s Violin Concerto<\/h2>
<\/div><\/figure><p>He was 66 when he began the concerto, and long recognised as one of Europe\u2019s greatest living composers. He was also a strong individualist who had come to occupy a unique position at the core, and yet sceptical, of the <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/musical-terms\/avant-garde-music\/\">avant garde<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 a seeming contradiction that his Violin Concerto richly encapsulates while transcending in its Bart\u00f3kian appeal. Full of outlandish timbres, abrupt swerves and expressive extremes, the piece is an extraordinary feat of imagination \u2013 and it requires just that from its virtuoso soloist, conductor and 22-piece chamber orchestra. <\/p><p>Indeed, every player becomes a soloist as Ligeti draws on a kaleidoscope of sounds and techniques: from medieval hocket to renaissance <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/articles\/what-ostinato\/\">ostinato<\/a><\/strong> and <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/articles\/baroque-music-guide\/\">Baroque<\/a> <\/strong>chorale; Eastern European folksong to Congolese polyrhythm; Romantic lyricism and modal tonality to complex dissonance and untempered tunings; ethereal dreamworlds to profound melancholy and surreal humour; sometimes all at once, and saturated with an underlying ambivalence. <\/p><p>With self-borrowing thrown into the mix (there\u2019s a <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/musical-terms\/what-is-a-melody\/\">melody<\/a><\/strong> from his 1951-3 <i>Musica ricercata<\/i>, for instance), it all amounts to a virtual compression of Ligeti\u2019s career within one brilliantly taut piece. Multiple contrasts are not simply juxtaposed, however, but integrated within the context of recent discoveries in ways quietly as radical as those he pioneered in earlier years.<\/p><div class=\"wp-block-group highlight-box is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container\"><ul><li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/works\/best-violin-concertos-of-all-time\/\">The greatest violin concertos of all time<\/a><\/strong><\/li><li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/instruments\/how-has-violin-sound-developed-through-the-years\/\">How has violin sound developed through the years?<\/a><\/strong><\/li><li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/works\/best-violin-music\/\">What are the best pieces of violin music?<\/a><\/strong><\/li><\/ul><\/div><\/div><p>In the 1960s, colour-packed works such as the <i>Lux aeterna<\/i> (1966) \u2013 famously purloined by film director Stanley Kubrick in<i> 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/i> \u2013 had established Ligeti at the vanguard of new techniques and soundworlds. <\/p><p>However, while peers like Stockhausen and <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/composers\/pierre-boulez\/\">Boulez<\/a><\/strong> craved freedom from the past, Ligeti found himself seeking freedom from the orthodoxy they themselves came to represent. An exile from Soviet-dominated Hungary, he loathed dogma and ultimately refused to reject a heritage that included diatonicism and indigenous traditions.<\/p><p>Yet Ligeti was also far from the nostalgic that some hearing his <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/composers\/johannes-brahms\/\">Brahms<\/a><\/strong>-dedicated Horn Trio in 1982 feared he might have become. On the contrary, he was driven by a modernist impulse to interrogate the past through the present and vice versa. This he did with great curiosity and skill, savouring \u2018irregularities\u2019 and the \u2018disorganised\u2019, as he put it, from within \u2018a set of rules adequate to the idea\u2019. Tellingly, he noted of his Piano Etudes: \u2018In my music, one finds neither that which one might call the \u201cscientific\u201d nor the \u201cmathematical\u201d; but rather a unification of construction with poetic, emotional imagination.\u2019 <\/p><p>The Violin Concerto wonderfully showcases these principles. Ligeti was much taken by 1980s theories of chaos and fractal mathematics, and the piece reflects a corresponding, almost synaesthetic fascination with colour, pattern and form. Incorporating ancient and non-Western microtonality, an orchestral violinist and violist tune their instruments to an \u2018out of tune\u2019 natural harmonic from the double bass, creating an eerie effect heightened by natural horns and wobbly ocarinas. <\/p><p>Similarly, complex matrices inspired by the discovery of Conlon Nancarrow\u2019s player piano studies, and of \u2018marvellous, polyphonic, polyrhythmic\u2019 African music, push asymmetric folk tunes and counterpoint into unexpected realms across bars and polymetres, creating dense yet intricate, volatile textures. <\/p><p>Through and above all this the soloist soars, skitters and laments in ways that are as unleashed as they are ultimately grounded in familiar concerto traditions. With co-creative spirit, Ligeti invites the player to compose their own final <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/articles\/what-is-a-cadenza\/\">cadenza<\/a><\/strong> if they so wish, or perform the one originally written by Gawriloff using discarded early material.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-best-recordings-of-ligeti-s-violin-concerto\">The best recordings of Ligeti\u2019s Violin Concerto<\/h2><h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-patricia-kopatchinskaja-violin\"><strong>Patricia Kopatchinskaja <i>(violin)<\/i><\/strong><\/h3><p><strong>Ensemble Modern\/Peter E\u00f6tv\u00f6s<\/strong><\/p><p><strong><i>Naive V5285<\/i><\/strong><\/p><p>The stars quite simply align in this stupendous 2012 recording by Moldovan violinist <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/artists\/who-is-patricia-kopatchinskaja\/\">Patricia Kopatchinskaja<\/a><\/strong> with Ensemble Modern and Peter E\u00f6tv\u00f6s \u2013 the ensemble and conductor who had premiered the five-movement Violin Concerto in 1992.<\/p><p>Of course, the soloist then was Ligeti\u2019s dedicatee, Saschko Gawriloff, whose subsequent premiere recording with Ensemble InterContemporain and Pierre Boulez continues to set an eloquently high bar. But Kopatchinskaja takes things into altogether new dimensions, conjuring a performance that feels wrought from her very nerves and sinew. <\/p><p>Wonderfully precise and controlled, she and the ensemble still manage to convey the sense of spontaneity and risk inherent in a score full of startling gestures and unusual sounds. The result is a kind of transitional space in which technical brilliance and playful theatricality exist to serve mercurial, deeply felt emotions. Crucially, this underlines the distinctly eastern European sensibility from which the concerto springs: where microtones and complex cross-rhythms are customarily part of music\u2019s expressive fabric \u2013 and where folk traditions are not just part of history, but a lived reality. <\/p><p>In the <i>Praeludium<\/i>, Kopatchinskaja\u2019s initial, open-fifth arpeggios are blurred with particular immediacy by \u2018mis-tunings\u2019 as the ensemble joins her, indicating the simultaneous tension and enchantment to come. Ligeti described the character of this first movement as \u2018glassy, shimmering\u2019 and its diaphanous harmonics as \u2018the expression of fragility and danger\u2019. And so it exquisitely proves, leading to a second movement <i>Aria \u2013 Hoquetus \u2013 Choral<\/i> rich with the molten yearning of its central folk melody. <\/p><p>The movement scheme of the concerto is broadly fast-slow-fast-slow-fast, and Kopatchinskaja and E\u00f6tv\u00f6s create a ferocious intensity that links each to the other, maximising Ligeti\u2019s extreme dynamics and articulation while making sense of sudden interruptions and hiatuses on the very brink of disintegration. <\/p><p>A macabrely spectral <i>Intermezzo<\/i> becomes a helter-skelter ride from which the <i>Passacaglia<\/i> calmly unfolds. But most astonishing is how every contradictory aspect of Ligeti\u2019s invention is gathered into the final <i>Appassionato<\/i>. The cadenza is Kopatchinskaja\u2019s own, an outpouring of unbridled virtuosity that celebrates like no other this passionately enigmatic work.<\/p><div class=\"wp-block-purple-m101-price-comparsion\"><div class=\"m101\" data-type=\"price-comparison\" data-template=\"default\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Bartok-Concerto-Eotvos-Ligeti-Violin\/dp\/B008R5OKH4\" data-title=\"\" data-config=\"{\" searchkeywords=\"\"\/><\/div><ul><li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/music.apple.com\/gb\/album\/bartok-e%C3%B6tv%C3%B6s-ligeti\/692858465\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stream on Apple Music<\/a><\/strong><\/li><\/ul><p\/><h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-frank-peter-zimmermann-violin\"><i>F<\/i><i>rank Peter Zimmermann<\/i><i> (violin)<\/i><\/h3><p><strong><i>Teldec 8573876312<\/i><\/strong><\/p><p>Zimmermann\u2019s masterly rendition was recorded in 2002 under the composer\u2019s watch. Conductor Reinbert de Leeuw and the Asko\/Sch\u00f6nberg Ensemble create sublimely balanced sonorities through which the violin sings with supple elegance and an unerring sense of purpose and direction. Ligeti\u2019s extremes of tessitura \u2013 ultra-high horns, piccolo and percussion contrasting laconic low flutes, cellos and clarinets \u2013 are delivered with unrivalled otherworldly clarity. The resulting tensions are thrillingly pushed to the limits of bearability.<\/p><div class=\"wp-block-purple-m101-price-comparsion\"><div class=\"m101\" data-type=\"price-comparison\" data-template=\"default\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/dp\/B001F1BLK6\/ref=sr_1_2\" data-title=\"\" data-config=\"{\" searchkeywords=\"\"\/><\/div><p\/><p> <\/p><h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-jeanne-marie-conquer-violin\"><i>Jeanne-Marie Conquer<\/i> <i>(violin)<\/i><\/h3><p><strong><i>Alpha ALPHA217<\/i><\/strong><\/p><p>Brilliantly teamed with Ensemble InterContemporain and Matthias Pintscher, Conquer\u2019s 2015 disc brings rich warmth and resonance, allied with adventurous spirit. Contrasting modes of attack are thoughtfully, edgily delivered, conveying the impression, for example, of the violin grappling for a hold within a skittering <i>Aria \u2013 Hoquetus \u2013 Choral<\/i>. The ensuing, embattled Intermezzo gives way to a compellingly schizoid <i>Passacaglia<\/i> and <i>Appassionato<\/i>, the energy almost but not quite carried through into the cadenza. Nonetheless, the harmonics here are exquisitely unsettling. <\/p><div class=\"wp-block-purple-m101-price-comparsion\"><div class=\"m101\" data-type=\"price-comparison\" data-template=\"default\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/dp\/B0973R5LY1\/ref=sr_1_1\" data-title=\"\" data-config=\"{\" searchkeywords=\"\"\/><\/div><p\/><h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-augustin-hadelich-violin\"><i>Augustin Hadelich<\/i><i> (violin)<\/i><\/h3><p><strong><i>Warner 9029551045<\/i><\/strong><\/p><p>Supported by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Hadelich delivers a passionate, highly personal account. Combining swashbuckling drama with whistling insouciance, he locates the off-kilter serenity in Ligeti\u2019s chromatic lyricism, finding ways through generous glissandos and vibrato to an elastic yet focused sense of <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/musical-terms\/what-is-pitch\">pitch<\/a><\/strong> and rhythm. The principal interest of this 2019 recording, though, is <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/composers\/thomas-ades\/\">Thomas Ad\u00e8s<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s cadenza: a homage to Ligeti that\u2019s at once touching, urbane and wonderfully absurd. <\/p><div class=\"wp-block-purple-m101-price-comparsion\"><div class=\"m101\" data-type=\"price-comparison\" data-template=\"default\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Brahms-Ligeti-Concertos-Augustin-Hadelich\/dp\/B07NBDYKGQ\/ref=sr_1_1\" data-title=\"\" data-config=\"{\" searchkeywords=\"\"\/><\/div><p\/><p><strong>And one to avoid\u2026<\/strong><\/p><p>There are many beguiling aspects to this 2000 recording from Christina \u00c5strand with the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, not least their bold enjoyment of the spectral smudge afforded by Ligeti\u2019s non-tempered tunings, lotus flutes and ocarinas. But the overall conception doesn\u2019t quite come together, and some curiously executed ensemble does nothing to dispel the impression of a patchworkof textures.<\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n<hr class=\"no-tts wp-block-separator\"\/>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Steph Power Published: Friday, 23 February 2024 at 14:29 PM Gy\u00f6rgy Ligeti\u2019s wild, radiantly paradoxical Violin Concerto has captured the imagination like few other modernist works of the last 30 \u2013 even 50 \u2013 years. The piece was composed between 1989 and \u201993 for the German violinist Saschko Gawriloff. Initially in three movements, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":39480,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"7"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/02\/ligetis-violin-concerto-how-it-was-written-and-its-best-recordings.jpg",900,900,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/02\/ligetis-violin-concerto-how-it-was-written-and-its-best-recordings-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/02\/ligetis-violin-concerto-how-it-was-written-and-its-best-recordings-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/02\/ligetis-violin-concerto-how-it-was-written-and-its-best-recordings-768x768.jpg",768,768,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/02\/ligetis-violin-concerto-how-it-was-written-and-its-best-recordings.jpg",800,800,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/02\/ligetis-violin-concerto-how-it-was-written-and-its-best-recordings.jpg",900,900,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/02\/ligetis-violin-concerto-how-it-was-written-and-its-best-recordings.jpg",900,900,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Steph Power Published: Friday, 23 February 2024 at 14:29 PM Gy\u00f6rgy Ligeti\u2019s wild, radiantly paradoxical Violin Concerto has captured the imagination like few other modernist works of the last 30 \u2013 even 50 \u2013 years. The piece was composed between 1989 and \u201993 for the German violinist Saschko Gawriloff. Initially in three movements, it…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/39479"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}