You might think a low-pitched period-instrument orchestra such as Les Siècles had nothing special to bring to a modernist composer such as György Ligeti, his works being written for the present-day orchestra. In fact, Ligeti played with issues such as tuning and temperament in a number of his works, in a search for an alternative to both atonality and minimalism.
In the Violin Concerto of 1989–93, the second movement, entitled Aria, Hoquetus, Choral, Ligeti uses the interruptions and repetitions commonly found in the medieval hocket to produce a totally new musical idiom that at the same time stretches back across the centuries.
Influences in the Violin Concerto are as diverse as Javanese and Hungarian folk music, Harry Partch and the bebop of Thelonious Monk. And Ligeti further manipulated intonation with the use of overtones produced by horns, alongside ocarinas, swanee whistles and mobile ring-tones – no, sorry, those aren’t in the score.
Both the soloist, Isabelle Faust, and Les Siècles under François-Xavier Roth dispatched the quirky virtuosity of the concerto with aplomb.
The Concert Românesc is a much earlier piece, dating from 1951. Even then Ligeti was ploughing his own furrow – and indeed the earthy music of Transylvanian peasants, more dissonant than the traditionalists of the Composer’s Union could condone, left a strong imprint. Roth drove the vigorous folk rhythms of the first two movements furiously, and they were redolent not so much of a day in the field as a night in an enchanted forest.
After the interval, Les Siècles abandoned their modern instruments and took up 18th-century ones for Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major and Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter). The fortepiano doesn’t carry well in the Albert Hall, it’s true, especially when it’s cocooned within the ensemble – doubtless to aid rapport. The coughing obbligato supplied by members of the audience didn’t help.
But such are the nuances of articulation and phrasing possible on the instrument that it enabled Alexander Melnikov to give a reading of extraordinary subtlety, rich in the kind of spontaneous embellishments Mozart would doubtless have supplied. Under Roth’s direction, the orchestra were sentient, rhythmically flexible collaborators.
In the symphony, Roth exploited pregnant silences, following them with explosive re-entries. Before Mozart’s virtuosic fugal coda in the finale, he interpolated an outrageously, surely record-breaking pause, typical of these gloriously idiosyncratic performances.
And so we were presented with the familiar paradox of ensembles like Les Siècles, drawing on historically-informed practice to create living, breathing organisms. An energising, life-enhancing evening.
