Ligeti, Reich: Martyn Brabbins (conductor), John Constable (piano), Shelagh Sutherland (piano), Barbara Hannigan (soprano) Mary King (mezzo-soprano), Omar Ebrahim (baritone), London Sinfonietta, Royal Festival Hall, London 19.5.2007 (AO)

 

One often circulated joke goes “I have heard one piece by X, and I declare him a genius/a disaster”. Such pronouncements are meaningless, especially in the case of prolific composers who are almost well known enough to be household names, as this programme demonstrated.   It started provocatively, with Ligeti’s Self-Portrait with Reich and Reilly (with Chopin in the background).  It’s a witty, whimsical piece, where Ligeti decided to meld Riley’s “pattern-repetition and Reich’s phase-shifting” with his own “superimposition of grids and ‘saturated’ canons.”

Two pianos are used, each player using one hand to mute keys in sequence, while the other plays fast-moving, circular figures on both sounding and muted keys. The pianos are positioned facing each other, one with its lid completely removed so the sound reflects differently. Development is achieved through changes of tempo and rhythmic pattern, and it’s tempting to hear miniature “portraits” of each composer discreetly embedded in each section, though, as Richard Toop wrote in 1999, it’s more “a matter of Ligeti pretending to be Reich and Riley in the process of trying to recompose Ligeti”.

Then we heard some echt Reich. Although a large kettledrum is used, his Sextet is built primarily on tuned percussion, notably marimbas and vibraphones, these with bows, as well as beaten with mallets, so the vibration is stretched out in an inventive way. Two pianos are also used, though sometimes a synthesizer is used to create a sound which resembles what a marimba might sound like if it were as large as an organ. Progression is through variation of speed and texture.

Reich completed this piece in 1985, after he’d come to know Ligeti, and after he’d gone to Africa to study African music.  By one of those impossible-to-invent co-incidences that serendipity throws out, it turned out that my companion for this concert had extensive first-hand knowledge of African music. He immediately recognised the influence, even though he didn’t know much about the composer’s background.  In certain parts of Africa, xylophones are a feature of music making.

In Mozambique, for example, ensembles of as many as 13 instruments, with different tonal pitches, play simultaneously, improvising as they go. After the concert, my friend read up on Reich, and discovered that they had both lived in the small, coastal Ewe region of eastern Ghana! Ligeti, too, had long been fascinated by African and non-western music, as had many composers before him – even Debussy, so hearing this in the context of a Ligeti tribute was worthwhile.  It’s also interesting, given the influence of gamelan on western composers that the African xylophone is virtually identical to the Indonesian xylophone.

Seeing Ligeti’s Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures live is a good experience because it is essentially a work of theatre, a long visual gimmick. It’s based on the sounds people can make with their bodies, rather than on words and meaning.  Thus, the three soloists splutter, snort, blow their noses, click their teeth and emote soundlessly.  When they do “sing”, the sounds they make are fragments of speech, odd vowels and parts of words, ejaculations like ooh and aah, deliberate extremes of pitch and volume.  More high jinx appear in the orchestra, where much is made of sound effects, such as the tearing of paper, the bursting of balloons and so forth. The theory is that human communication can be expressed without language, and that meaning as such, is irrelevant.  Yet, precisely because of the gestures, grunts and gesticulation, the brain constantly seizes on elements of meaning, even though they flash past without connection.  At one point, Ebrahim says simply what sounds like “She!” with exaggerated horror, pointing at the female pianist (Shelagh Sutherland) and the audience cracks up laughing. Somehow, the listener is supposed to simultaneously respond to meaning while affecting to ignore it.

Still, these random noises do present an aural game where some understanding does count.  For example, the soprano, Barbara Hannigan does a wonderful take-off of an operatic “mad scene” but you have to know what a “mad scene” is to appreciate its connotations.  Even in 1962-65, the concept was not new.  Antecedents in theatre go back at least to Ionescu, and in music, Berio and others turned the genre, into great art. Amusing as these two pieces are, they are essentially experimental, an exploration of the possibilities of vocal sound for its own sake.  These ideas have been developed since, and to greater depth.  Still, these pieces are amusing, and not too challenging to listen to, a useful introduction to the genre and the times they were written.

More substantial, and enduring, is Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto.    Yet again, it is a work where two pianists also play harpsichord, harmonium, and celeste.  Indeed, throughout the piece, the musicians operate in smaller, varying units.  By using these units, where pitch and key vary subtly, Ligeti builds a dense, oscillating tapestry, where instruments play similar, but not identical figures, to create a “blurring“, amorphous effect.  The richness is enhanced by small details, such when the strings are strummed, like guitars, or played as percussion, small blocks beaten against their wooden bodies, the deliberately hollow tone taken up by piano. Flashes of melody surface out of the murmurings, to highlight variations in the development, which flows so naturally, that it seems almost organic. Recurring cells of notes repeat, hammered incessantly, most quirkily when the clarinets pound out a strange ostinato.  The tension between this defined rhythmic pulse and the freer, irrepressible harmonies, gives the piece great vivacity.  This music brought out the best in Brabbins and the Sinfonietta, even though the audience seemed to react far more enthusiastically to Reich and Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures. 

 

Anne Ozorio