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Composed and Decomposed: Music of Our Centuries by
Steve Koenig The Ensemble Sospeso has done it again, giving us a one-composer concert you're unlikely to find anywhere else. This time it was an all-Gyorgy Ligeti concert, and it shed new light on pieces I knew, but not well. One day I'm gong to make good on my threat to our editor and hear the Sony complete Ligeti edition I think I spied on his shelf. At Columbia University's Miller Theater, the program began with Stephen Gosling performing four pieces from the composer's two books of Piano Etudes. Ligeti's Horn Trio, in homage to Brahms, always leaves me cold, although I give special marks to violinist Mark Menzies. Rehearing the excellent performance on Bridge 9012 (Rolf Schulte, William Purvis, and Alan Feinberg) confirmed that it wasn't this performance; I just don't like the horn writing of the piece, despite some nifty horn blats here and there. The piano and violin are given some great interplay, and in the closing lament, the piano gives quiet beauty and joy, but then the horn returns. Oh well. The 1966 Concerto for Cello and Orchestra was delicately luxurious. I love the sonority Ligeti creates when the bass and, in turn, the violin partner the cello. The woodwinds make you aware of the wood in the bodies of the string instruments, the flutes beautiful cousins adding tonal variety. It ends in an exquisite falling silence. If cellist Christopher Finckel didn't make seamless one very extended note, as I suspect it should be, everything else he did was breathtaking. I was wary of what I had thought was a boringly thorny piece, the Chamber Concerto, having given away my Decca Headline LP ages ago. Instead, I found a flowing corrente movement, no more difficult to digest than Verklarte Nacht, followed by a calmo, sostenuto, and a movement preciso e meccanico which was motoric but not dry. |