Ligeti Quartets for a Rapt Portuguese Audience

As I sat down for Sunday's excellent concert by the French ensemble Quatour Béla, I got nervous. The audience of 500 or so contained lots of families, including kids under 12. Did they know what they were getting into? Two quartets by Geörgi Ligeti (1923-2006), plus another by his quirky US contemporary Conlon Nancarrow (1923-1997). My experience in the USA with kids attending “difficult” concerts has generally been poor, and I worried about squirming and chatter disrupting what I know would be some very soft dynamics. Not to worry! Behind me, a 12-year-old was chatting with his father, bilingually dropping the names Chomsky, Mahler, and Bartok. The audience was eerily quiet and raptly attentive throughout the 1 hour concert. Apparently, I had wandered into a big Lisbon intellectual family outing!

We all saw a great concert by a quartet that has been together 17 years, specializing in contemporary music. They often collaborate with folk, pop, and ethnic musicians, rather like the Kronos Quartet in the USA. The first Ligeti quartet was composed in 1954, before the young composer had left communist Hungary for the West. The quartet was not performed until after his departure, since it was too modernist for the government at that time. It’s a fascinating piece, really a follow up to the Bartok quartets, with lots of Hungarian dance rhythms mixed with interesting counterpoint and a few sonic special effects that point to his later work. There was even a rather hokey waltz mixed into the goulash. The second quartet (1968) was quite different--mature Ligeti, sounding a bit like the Lux Aeterna that I reviewed at Gulbenkian recently, or the music from the spacey part of 2001 A Space Odyssey. There were lots of microtonal clusters and interesting timbres. The names of the movements were cool and very reflective of the music:

1.     Allegro nervosa

2.     Sostenuto, molto calmo (featured muted strings, microtonal clusters)

3.     Come un meccanismo di precisione  (lots of pizzicato in devilish compound rhythms)

4.     Presto furioso, brutale, tumultuoso (3 minutes long, the title is apt)

5.     Allegro con delicatezza

Between these two wonderful quartets the artists performed a short quartet by Nancorrow, an American who mostly lived in Spain (fighting against Franco) and then Mexico, composing thorny modernist pieces on player piano. He liked that instrument because he could make his scores as complex as he liked, without worrying about whether or not the players could perform the music. This short quartet (12 minutes) was not so formidable as that. It had lots of nice intertwining counterpoint, but did not grip me as did the Ligeti.

All in all an invigorating afternoon of demanding chamber music, performed to a large and appreciative audience. I am excited that so many young people got to hear it!