Few composers in history have undergone such a radical change of stylistic direction mid-career as György Ligeti. The music he composed in the 1960s and 70s is remarkable for its rejection of prevailing musical dogma and its delight in the sheer beauty and sensuality of sound. What then emerged from the early 80s until his death in 2006 is just as remarkable in an utterly different way, absorbing elements from a huge range of traditions, from Europe, Africa and the new world, to create music that remains unclassifiable.
Ligeti in Wonderland, the Southbank Centre’s weekend-long festival curated by artist-in-residence Pierre-Laurent Aimard, focused on these late, often marvellously strange works. Almost all the major scores from this final phase of Ligeti’s career were included, for which Aimard was joined by violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, horn-player Marie Luise Neunecker and, in the closing concert, the Aurora Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon.
With performances as fine as anyone could have hoped for, it was full of wonderful things – confirmation, if any was still needed, of Ligeti’s place among the greats of 20th-century music. The Aurora programme contained the three large-scale orchestral works composed during that last period, all of them concertos – for piano, violin, and horn. Collon prefaced them with a reminder of the enchantment of Ligeti’s earlier soundworld in a glittering performance of his 1970 work Chamber Concerto.
The soloists in the concertos were all in their different ways exceptional. Aimard, who had performed 18 of Ligeti’s solo-piano Études the previous evening, has become the definitive interpreter of this technically fearsome keyboard writing. He coolly negotiated the torrential polyrhythmic writing of the Piano Concerto as it snares the orchestra in its tangled webs. The Hamburg Concerto, in which the solo horn is partnered by a quartet of natural horns, creating all manner of microtonal tuning effects, is dedicated to Neunecker; its final movement was the last thing Ligeti wrote. And then there was Kopatchinskaja in the violin work, an astonishing force of nature, powering her way through its hair-raising difficulties as the orchestra conjured a half-remembered world that seems gradually to be slipping beyond recall, and throwing in a cadenza of her own for good measure, one totally consistent with Ligeti’s surreal world.
In the opening concert, Kopatchinskaja had joined Neunecker and Aimard for an equally searing performance of the work that had introduced the new Ligeti – the 1982 Horn Trio. It is a homage to Brahms that delights in the microtonal ambiguities of the natural horn while incorporating rhythmic ideas from the Balkans, Africa and the Caribbean (as well as the motto from Beethoven’s Les Adieux sonata), and packs an enormous and tragic emotional punch for good measure. There was also the transitional two-piano Monument-Selbstportrait-Bewegung of 1976 – played by Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich – in which, like a conjuror explaining some of his tricks, Ligeti reveals how his style connects with the early minimalism of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and even with the finale of Chopin’s B flat minor sonata.
That programme had opened with Poème Symphonique, the 1962 piece for 100 ticking metronomes that all run down at different rates, creating unpredictable patterns. It was a reminder that, alongside the immense sophistication of Ligeti’s music, there was always his childlike delight in the absurd, and a wicked sense of humour.
