Gyorgy Ligeti was displeased when Stanley Kubrick used some of his music on the soundtrack of his 1967 sci-fi classic, 2001, A Space Odyssey. The movie and the soundtrack album that was issued at the time of the film's release, which contained excerpts from pieces by Ligeti, were both big hits and Ligeti achieved a popularity and, most likely, a bank-account boost of the kind few avant-garde composers can dream of. But on the other hand it is true that, whatever the composer's actual intentions may have been, no one who has seen the film will be able to hear Ligeti's Atmospheres without thinking of the film's hallucinatory imagining of the surface of Jupiter, or his Lux Aeterna without memories surfacing of Kubrick's lunar shuttle skimming over craters and peaks.
LIGETI: ‘Requiem’; ‘Apparitions’; ‘San Francisco Polyphony’. WDR Sinfonieorchester Koeln, WDR Rundfunkchor Koeln, SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart conducted by Peter Eotvos. BMC CD/DVD combo CD 166
The Ligeti piece used in 2001 that made the strongest impression on many listeners at the time was the excerpt from the Kyrie from his Requiem. Perhaps that is why this comparatively short, 25-minute work, which requires a 20-part chorus, a big orchestra, soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, and is fiercely demanding for singers and orchestral musicians, has had fairly frequent performances and has now been given, by my count, its third commercial recording.
The "micropolyphonic" compositional style that Ligeti was using at the time, but later abandoned as limited and unwieldy, involved dividing the big ensemble into a great many parts, each given its own polyphonic voice. In his notes to this release, Marton Kerekfy describes the technique as used in the Requiem: "The 20-part choir enables [the composer] to create a densely woven polyphonic texture in which individual parts can no longer be heard separately: they move to both complement one another and cancel each other out. The result is a kind of iridescent sound, which within is busy with contrapuntal activity, but from without seems static." In the four movements of the Requiem that Ligeti composed, the character of this dense musical fabric varies from serene and abstract in the outer movements to seething turbulence and violence in the two middle movements.
In his recent recording of the Requiem, conductor Eotvos seems to use a smaller chorus than is heard in either of the two earlier recorded performances by Michael Gielen (Wergo) and Jonathan Nott (Teldec). He also offers a smoother, less overtly dramatic account of the piece than either of his predecessors.
The opening Introitus, which gradually ascends from the darkness of lowest bass register of the chorus to the bright light of the extreme treble of both the choral singers and accompanying winds, is impeccably contoured here, and the concluding Lacrimosa is also performed with great subtlety and control as it gradually drifts away into nothingness.
The two middle movements, however, expertly performed as they are, lack the impact that they have under Gielen and Nott. There are some pieces of music that gain expressive force just through the struggle that the musicians must experience to perform them. The choir of the Bayersichen Rundfunks under Gielen, singing in the 1960s when music like this was unprecedented, sound at times like they are just managing it by the skin of their teeth, and the feeling of tension comes across to the listener in both the Kyrie and the De Die Judicii. Gielen's soprano, Liliana Poli, and to a lesser degree his mezzo, Barbara Ericson, are pushed well beyond their limits in the latter movement. The screechy tone that both produce doesn't detract from the performance; in fact it adds to the intensity of Ligeti's evocation of the Day of Wrath.
In Eotvos' new (2008) recording, made in an era where the Requiem has become a new music classic, the musicians have the wild score well under control. The tidal surges of the Kyrie, despite BMC's superb recorded sound, do not inspire the same awe that they do under Gielen or Nott, and the security with which soloists Hannigan and Parry negotiate the merciless demands of the Dies Irae take away some of its edge and make it clear that its technique of alternating choral hysteria with sustained notes and acrobatic leaping about, sung fortissimo by the two soloists, yields diminishing returns in a movement that goes on for too long.
Apparitions (1958-59) was the first piece that Ligeti composed after leaving the creatively stifling atmosphere of communist Budapest for Germany. During his early days there he experimented with electronic music and, as Kerekfy points out in his notes, the new uses of sound that he learned in the electronic music studio were applied experimentally in this work. It is one of the least performed of Ligeti's works _ and probably for a reason. Despite its often exotic sonorities, the sudden, startling eruptions of sound come across as examples of the shock tactics of the kind typical of the era and if there is anything deeper being communicated than the composer's excitement at working with new sonic materials, they don't come across to me.
Far more interesting is San Francisco Polyphony, composed in the early 1970s when Ligeti was beginning to lighten musical textures, allowing the polyphonic voices to become more audible and expressive. Like Melodien, written a couple of years earlier, the greater transparency allows the voices to converse and interweave with a fluidity that is out of range in works like the Requiem.
Eotvos' virtuosic performance of both of these pieces are on a par with those in the Sony/Teldec complete Ligeti Edition, although if I could only keep one account of San Francisco Polyphony it would be Howarth's on the Wergo label, with its greater sprightliness and feeling of involvement.
BMC have gone all out on the production of this programme. The release includes a CD and a DVD audio disc of the music, both ideally clear and atmospheric, with the DVD version state-of-the-art. The accompanying booklet is packed with information on the composer and the music, and the design is striking, as it usual with releases from this source.
I ordered my copy from amazon.co.uk.
