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Square film overlay8/12/2023 Having said that, there were also certain differences, not least in the style of the music, which unlike the mish-mash of old and new in Charles’s coronation was a satisfying resplendent unity. And above all there had to be trumpets, playing brassy, regal fanfares. And alongside this there had to be maximal musical splendour of voices, organ, and instruments of every kind. Like our new monarch, the doge was a semi-sacred personage, who had to be consecrated through the singing of an entire mass. With memories of Charles III’s coronation still fresh in our minds, it was fascinating to witness this recreation of the music for a doge’s coronation in St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice in 1595, and realise how little, in some respects, has changed. The Aldeburgh Festival ends Sunday 25 June Ī New Venetian Coronation, Aldeburgh Festival ★★★★☆ It was a delightful 75 minutes, which proved that, though Ligeti has departed, his benign fructifying spirit is still in the air. Among them were Sidney Corbett’s Suspended Disbelief, a touching evocation of Ligeti’s jazz mode, and Elliot Galvin’s Hungarian Metal, which translated the dancing original into a contemporary club world. Many of these new pieces strove often successfully to capture something of Ligeti’s lightning-fast, scurrying sound-world, but the ones that caught my ear were those that imagined very un-Ligeti-like sounds. But they rose to the challenge with smiling, foot-stamping aplomb. To expect these four young musicians to then play a third concert containing 15 brand-new two-minute quartets, composed in homage to one of Ligeti’s 18 piano Études seems not far from sadism. 2 of 1968 took on a moving human quality, because we understood where they came from. That quality shone out in the performances by the Ligeti Quartet, which were of truly superhuman finesse and passion. At the end of The Baladă şi joc (Ballad and Dance) for two violins from 1950 the music magically dematerialised in a way that was pure Ligeti.Īll this meant the later pieces like the String Quartet no. But here and there you could spot glimpses of the composer Ligeti would later become. Here we heard them in the context of the music he composed in the 1940s and 1950s, before his night-time escape from communist dictatorship in Hungary.Īt that time Ligeti’s musical god was his great Hungarian forebear Béla Bartók, and it was touching to hear Ligeti call on the same lilting Hungarian and Romanian folk melodies and stamping Balkan dances that Bartók had used. Normally we hear Ligeti’s mature works from the 1960s onwards in isolation, which can make it seem as if his music dropped from the sky fully formed in all its glacial purity, delicate tracery and sudden brutal pratfalls. The splendid defiance of the zeitgeist manifested in the two concerts given yesterday, offering the complete music for strings by the great Hungarian modernist György Ligeti (who would have been 100 years old this year) was one of their most pleasurable aspects.īut of course it was Ligeti’s fabulously inventive music, light-footed even when dark, which won our hearts and minds. These are the mantras of our cultural masters in government, which thank goodness the Aldeburgh Festival cheerfully ignores. If you must do it make sure it’s in small doses and sweetened with something nice, if you want to avoid the dreaded accusation of elitism. Think twice, before you offer your audience challenging modern music.
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