Juilliard Chamberfest 2: Ligeti and Penderecki

The second Chamberfest performance I attended this season was an hour long recital that was also part of the Juilliard's Wednesdays at One series.  Due to the short length, the works of only two composers -Ligeti and Penderecki - were featured, but both were stalwarts of twentieth century music and I considered myself lucky to have heard these masterworks.

The program opened with Ligeti's String Quartet No. 1, Métamorphoses nocturnes (1953-1954).  According to Wikipedia, this early piece, written before Ligeti emigrated from Hungary, was inspired by Bartók's third and fourth string quartets even though the composer had never actually heard these works but had only seen their scores.  Though the quartet is in one movement, it consists of seventeen separate sections.

I first became interested in Ligeti's music several seasons ago when I attended an ACJW Ensemble performance conducted by Simon Rattle at which the composer's Violin Concerto and Mysteries of the Macabre, an excerpt from the 1977 opera Le grand macabre, were performed.  This was long before I knew anything of Ligeti's history or of his impact on twentieth century music and  culture.  I was not aware, for example, of Kubrick's use of Ligeti's work in 2001: A Space Odyssey though I had, of course, seen the film many times.

Listening to the quartet, though I could indeed discern the influence of Bartók throughout, I was most struck at the distinctive style Ligeti had already developed at such a young age.  The atonal music was completely assured and masterfully written.  This was all the more remarkable when one considers that the composer was still living in Hungary at the time and was thus deprived - as were Schnittke and other Soviet composers - of access to the latest developments in Western music.  It would be another two years before the composer arrived in the West and began keeping company with its musical avant-garde.  In an article on the WQXR website, Harris Brown remarks of this work:

"...the music is marked by jarring folk rhythms, a neurotic adherence to counterpoint and episodes of solitude and violence. But Ligeti's own voice is omnipresent, as are the seeds of what would later become known as his "micropolyphony"—dense flurries of activity that result in highly complex and kinetic frenzied clusters."

The next and final piece on the program was Penderecki's two-movement Sextet (2000) for piano, violin, viola, cello, clarinet and horn.  This too was a powerful work though quite different from the Ligeti.  It was in two distinct movements beginning with an allegreto moderato that seemed in some ways only a prelude to the longer larghetto that followed.  It was at the start of the second movement that the horn player rose and left the stage with score in hand.  He then spent most of the movement playing from offstage and only returned to the company of the other instruments toward the end.  This had a disquieting effect - as if one were observing a conversation from which a single member had abruptly departed though his voice could still be heard in the distance.  In spite of this, the work was not at all difficult to listen to.  The finale had a gentle meditative quality that drew in the audience as if inviting it to ponder some eternal question.

The musicians on both pieces played extremely well on obviously complex and difficult music.  In addition, hornist Trevor Nuckols gave a short speech before the Penderecki began in which he expressed the pleasure - what he described as a "rollercoaster" of fun - he had had in rehearsing with his fellow students.  Though not very informative about the music itself, it was truly affecting for its sincerity and the more valuable for that.