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SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW
Capriccio 1 and 2 (1947)
Invention (1948)
Musica ricercata (1951-3)
This was a wonderful concert! As if the promise of a complete performance
of Ligeti's Musica ricercata were not enough, we had, as has
often been the case with Transition_Projects events at Kings Place,
a bonus, this time in the place of some even earlier Ligeti piano
pieces. One entered Hall Two to see a man, played by the excellent Andrew
Stephen, seated nearly motionless at a typewriter, and his projection on
the screen behind. Crackling radio-like noises evoked a post-war
environment, suggestive of the world in which Ligeti came of age, and more
specifically suggestive of his father, in the words of Netia Jones's
helpful note, 'a highly intellectual and cultivated man constantly
surrounded by science and research books, who would spend days clattering
away on a typewriter'. Such matters remained an abiding interest for
Györgi Ligeti; this concert provided a relatively rare opportunity to
experience his musical life at the beginning: not as a documentary, but as
a fascinating and enjoyable imaginary encounter. Ricercata as
research, then, as well as musical form…
The previously advertised Ryan Wigglesworth had at some point been
replaced with Danny Driver, who proved a sure guide in our fifty-minute
tour. The notes were not merely played, but connected: always a crucial
thing, but of particular relevance given the additive plan of Musica
ricercata, on which more in a moment. First, however, we heard the
bonus pieces: not mere bonuses, of course, but characterful in their own
right and enlightening background to the main course. First, a title
screen was typed - and screened. Dictionary and technical definitions of
words such as 'contrapuntal' and so forth appeared on screen thereafter,
Ligeti's autodidacticism brought to the fore. We also saw Driver's hands
at one point. Bartók's influence was keenly felt, especially in the second
Capriccio: sometimes, at least, a dangerous thing in post-war
Hungary, as Ligeti would already have known.
Musica ricercata is a set of eleven pieces, unperformed until 1969,
in which each piece has one more pitch class than its predecessor. Thus,
the first is restricted to A, with D introduced at the end; the second, E
sharp, F sharp, and G, and so on. Bartók is still an audible presence, but
Ligeti's own ricercata is the guiding principle. In Jones's
words, 'his voracious intellect … [led] to research in many different
directions, from his favourite books, What is Mathematics?
(Richard Courant & Herbert Robbins) and A la recherche du temps perdu
(Marcel Proust) to early compositional techniques and methods. An
open-ended research that could last a lifetime … [and] a foretaste of the
exhilarating invention that was to come.'
Jones's projections and Stephen's stage action genuinely added to the
sense of research and invention. The man's pacing, increasing to running,
seemed to liberate our aural imaginations during the first piece, not to
restrict them; there was no suggestion that this was what the music was
'about', but it worked. Process music this may be, in some sense, but
there are different processes at work, so visual processes must vary too.
Moreover, it is certainly not merely process music; it is full of
character and wit, once more aided and abetted by the visuals. Not that
one should forget the musical performance that lay at the evening's heart:
Driver's clearly insistent alternation between E flat and E natural during
the jaunty third piece had its own, 'musical' tale to tell. Before the
fourth piece began, we even heard an organ-grinder, again through radio
crackling, setting up nicely the waltz music to come, even providing an
intriguing setting for Ligeti's exploration of piano harmonics. The ninth
piece is explicitly dedicated to Bartók's memory; however, its
low-sounding bells proved equally evocative of two other composers:
Schoenberg's reminiscence of Mahler's funeral in the last of the op.19
Six Little Piano Pieces. Accompanying this - again, wisely
not attempting to translate it into pictures - was a striking image of a
man holding a pocket-sized version of himself in his hands, and squashing
it. Surrealism would soon be a valued addition to Ligeti's universe;
perhaps it was already. Another aural connection evoked through Driver's
performance was the kinship - intentional? I do not know - between the
tenth piece and the finale of Prokofiev's Seventh Piano Sonata.
(Interestingly, Alexander Goehr dedicated his contemporaneous, 1952, Piano
Sonata, op.2, to Prokofiev's memory.) Finally came the Omaggio a
Girolamo Frescobaldi, in which necessarily full chromaticism came
delightfully into play with contrapuntal designs and research: musica
ricercata in the fullest sense, not just the work, but its
performance and presentation too.
Mark Berry