Ligeti & Nørgård: Violin Concertos

Ligeti & Nørgård: Violin Concertos

Ligeti & Nørgård: Violin Concertos
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CD Details

Composer: Gyorgy Ligeti
Composer: Per Nørgård
Conductor: Thomas Dausgaard
Orchestra: Danish National Symphony Orchestra
Performer: Christina Åstrand
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2000-08-22
Music Label: Chandos
Soundtracks:
  1. Violin Concerto: Praeludium
  2. Violin Concerto: Aria, Hoquetus, Chorale
  3. Violin Concerto: Intermezzo
  4. Violin Concerto: Passacaglia
  5. Violin Concerto: Appassionato
  6. Helle Nacht: Violin Concerto - Light night: Allgro moderato
  7. Helle Nacht: Violin Concerto - Light night: Adagio
  8. Helle Nacht: Violin Concerto - Light night: Allegretto leggero
  9. Helle Nacht: Violin Concerto - Light night: Poco allegro
  10. Sonata: 'The Secret Melody': Prologue
  11. Sonata: 'The Secret Melody': Roaming
  12. Sonata: 'The Secret Melody': Singing
  13. Sonata: 'The Secret Melody': Playing
  14. Sonata: 'The Secret Melody': Epilogue

Music reviews of Ligeti & Nørgård: Violin Concertos

Music Review: A disc with two of the most ingenious violin concertos of our time.
Rating: 5 Stars

This Chandos disc combines the violin concertos of two highly original figures, the criminally underappreciated Danish composer Per Norgard and the late Gyorgy Ligeti, and is filled out by Norgard's viola "Sonata" arranged for violin. The soloist is Christina Astrand and she performs with the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Thomas Dausgaard. Both of the concertos are strikingly similar in that they both experiment with tunings and each composer quotes some of his youthful work in the new.

Per Norgard (born 1931) has made an enormous amount of contributions to the language of 20th- (and now 21st-!) century music. His discovery of the infinity series, a method of generating melody that exhibits dazzling fractal-like self-similarity, should have been enough to bring him to the forefront of contemporary music. His Symphony No. 3 of 1975, where the melodic infinity series is joined by similar limitless wells in harmony and rhythm, making a listen to the work almost religious ecstasy in the cohension of all its parts, is well-regarded by its own crowd of music fans.

Yet Norgard didn't stop there. In the 1980s, he went on to explore concepts of musical interference. In the last movements of his four-movement "Violin Concerto No. 1: Helle Nacht" (1986-87), a new entirely original development appears, the so-called "tone lakes". Take three notes from a given melody, work out its inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion, and weave them into the same line: you've got a melody that seems to flow not only forward, but ripples out in all directions at once. Not only that, but since you can put a new expression of the series ad infinitum in between any two notes, Norgard continues to provide music of endless possibilities.

The use of tone lakes is not the only example of interference. The first movement quotes from one early Norgard work before drastically changing course toward a quotation of another. Furthermore, throughout the movement we hear "beat tones", the mysterious pulsations heard when a note is played against itself or its octave in slightly different tunings. In the third movement, the solo line consists of three different traditional melodies heard at the same time.

So what does this mean for the listener? Norgard has always used his discoveries in ways that make for pleasant listening; only the most conservative of classical fans would find anything grating here, so one can approach the concerto as sweet and entertaining music. The use of so many contrasting segments, however, means that there is always something new to hear within. This is a work that won't leave one bored after a few first hearings. I've not heard the world premiere recording where the soloist is Anton Kontra, the work's dedicatee, but I can't imagine things can get better than Astrand's performance here.

Norgard's solo "Sonata" was originally written for the violist Nobuko Imai, but the German violinist Heinrich Hoerlein arranged it for violin with Norgard's approval. Throughout the piece a melody seems to assert itself, only to then be revealed as part of a larger melody. While one of Norgard's minor works, the Sonata is exciting with its clear dramatic arc and the multifaceted personality of the solo instrument.

Gyorgy Ligeti's "Violin Concerto" (1989-92) is a carnival of microtones. The orchestra consists of ten wind players, percussion, and eleven solo strings, and tuning varies wildly. Brass players often play natural harmonics that clash with equal temperment, two string players retune their instruments to follow the seemingly out-of-tune sounds of the double-bass, and several players turn to imprecise ocarinas and slide whistles. Like many works of the late Ligeti, this is in a postmodern vein, where the composer not only showcases his own new ideas but quotes his own past works ("Musica Ricercata") and borrows from Balkan folk music concepts. I concur with those who would call this music "wacky", it's certainly exhuberant and hops from style to style in a very fun way. One would have to consider the reading of Frank Peter Zimmermann et al. on Teldec/Warner Classics' THE LIGETI PROJECT III to be definitive, since Ligeti supervised its recording. However, Astrand's performance is very impressive indeed.

The sheer amount of theoretical innovation here combined with a sensuous and engaging soundworld makes this a disc I very much recommend.
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