ligeti

I played my first concerts in Switzerland this week, performing Ligeti's Melodien for chamber orchestra as part of contemporary music series here in Lausanne and also in Annemasse, France.

First of all, it was great program, a composer portrait of Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006), a Romanian/Hungarian composer, including two orchestral works and two chamber music works. There was variety in the program in terms of type of ensemble, but the concert was also preceded by a lecture on Ligeti (which I did not listen to).

When I got on stage I was impressed by how attentive he audience was (and this was the last piece of the program, nonetheless). As we played the ethereal melodies and textures of the Ligeti, I realized, even through my intense concentration (this piece is quite demanding on the player...subdividing a beat into anywhere from 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, to 12 parts) I realized that there was a sort of hush in the concert hall, that the audience was captured by the music.

It's really cool to feel like that while playing music that can be inaccessible on first hearing.

In Annemasse, as well, two nights later we played the same concert. This time instead of a pre-concert lecture the conductor spoke briefly about each piece, and performers played brief musical examples. When it came to the Ligeti string quartet (really great piece, by the way) he talked about a sort of characteristic of Ligeti's music, of two opposing textures which he called "Clocks and Clouds." The clocks representing motives of a more driving, mechanistic nature, the clouds the atmospheric chords and harmonics that proliferate.

I didn't get the sense that the audience was shifting in their seats or bored out of their minds, as I sometimes do at contemporary music concerts. I was impressed at how lovingly and engagingly the conductor spoke of the music, dispensing, I thought, the right amount of information before each piece.