THE COMPLEXITY OF LIGETI
                    And the Rare Virtuosity of Tetzlaff
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Jan. 9-16,  2012
                                                                  Vol. 14, No. 35 
            The San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas launched the new year with a largely Hungarian program with complexity in spades.
            The piece de resistance was the 1992 Violin Concerto of György Ligeti, a half-hour labyrinth of musical obfuscation. Don’t get me wrong---I admire the late composer,  particularly for his ethereal choral work in “Atmosphères” and other pieces that had been “borrowed” for the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
            But the composer has never taken the simple road, having explored serial music, tone clusters, and now microtones in his work. The violin concerto calls for several players in the chamber orchestra to retune their instruments for quartertone intervals. Instead of articulating Ligeti’s musical Olympus, the notes swirl into a sonic fog, abetted by occasional entries of humble ocarinas and slide whistles you encounter in the grade-school music class, with numerous glissandi. These all back an  extremely difficult solo part played Dec. 6 by violinist Christoph Tetzlaff, who never shrinks before the greatest challenges, darting, bobbing, and managing the great leaps and harmonics in his rogue-cannon role of furious fiddling. Tetzlaff had also composed the cadenza (extended solo) for his violin, which Ligeti allowed.
            Among the five movements, a sharp contrast came from the slow section, “Aria.” Its languid violin theme that could even have come from Bach, given its consonance. While MTT spoke of some of this opus coming “from village music,” establishing that sonic tie would take a better listener than this one.
            With this one behind us, I would warmly welcome other works from this inventive Rumanian-born ethnic Hungarian with his yen for exotic sound textures, an émigré figure who lived much of his life in Vienna and Hamburg to escape Communism. Playing one of his choral opuses would certainly be apt.
            A propos the Liszt bicentennial, MTT also played the splashy and ultra-dramatic tone poem “Prometheus,” about the mythic hero who underwent trials leading to humankind’s civility, enlightenment and independence. The episodic 12-minute work has many contrasts---a triumphal march, a fugue, brassy fanfares, and a stormy enough segment to match Beethoven. If it lacked complexity, it more than made up in variety, and showed off the orchestra’s virtuosity.
            The concert concluded with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1.
            LOCAL MUSIC NOTES---The veteran Ligeti had been honored with a whole evening of his works at Stanford University prior to the millennium, in his final visit to Northern California.
            These San Francisco Symphony concerts continued through Jan. 8 at 2 p.m. For info: (415) 864-6000, or go  online. Broadcasts on KDFC-FM (102.1) at 8 p.m. on the second Tuesday following.

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2012
                                       #
        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
                      #
             Return to main menu.