Musica ricercata

1 Sostenuto –Misurato – Prestissimo

2 Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale

3 Allegro con spirito

4 Tempo di valse (poco vivace – “à l’orgue de Barbarie”)

5 Rubato. Lamentoso

6 Allegro molto capriccioso

7 Cantabile, molto legato

8 Vivace. Energico

9 Adagio. Mesto – Allegro maestoso (Béla Bartók in memoriam)

10 Vivace. Capriccioso

11 Andante misurato e trqnauillo (Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi)

György Ligeti (1923–2006)

Musica ricercata

1 Sostenuto –Misurato – Prestissimo

2 Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale

3 Allegro con spirito

4 Tempo di valse (poco vivace – “à l’orgue de Barbarie”)

5 Rubato. Lamentoso

6 Allegro molto capriccioso

7 Cantabile, molto legato

8 Vivace. Energico

9 Adagio. Mesto – Allegro maestoso (Béla Bartók in memoriam)

10 Vivace. Capriccioso

11 Andante misurato e trqnauillo (Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi)

Ligeti got out of Hungary at the time of the ruthlessly suppressed uprising against Soviet domination in 1956. As an essentially progressive composer working under a Stalinist regime – which had banned not only Schoenberg and Stravinsky but also Debussy, Ravel and Britten – there was no future for him in Budapest. The one advantage of the situation he escaped from was that, since it had no chance of being published or performed, music written to his own rather than Soviet principles could be as radical as he liked, as long as he kept quiet about it. “In 1951,” he recalled “I began to experiment with very simple structures of sonorities and rhythms as if to build up a new kind of of music starting from nothing… I set myself such problems as what can I do with a single note? with its octave? with two intervals?…”

That was the thinking behind Musica ricercata (music with self-imposed restrictions) which was written in Budapest between 1951 and 1953 and has since become one of Ligeti’s most frequently performed works. While he doesn’t go so far as to limit himself in any of the eleven pieces to just one note, the first of them consists of nothing but repeated As until the entry of a D four bars before the end. With virtually no possibility of melody or harmony in these circumstances, the composer has to find interest in colour (mainly by means of octave transpositions, varied dynamics and pedal effects), rhythm and tempo – which he does here with remarkably dramatic results. Having restricted himself to two notes in the opening Sostenuto, Ligeti allows himself three notes (E sharp, F sharp and G) in the following Mesto. The first, violently stressed entry of the G, at about half-way through, symbolises for Ligeti (in words quoted by Richard Steinitz in his authorative book on the composer ) “a knife through Stalin’s heart.”

The pattern of increasing by one the number of notes available with every successive piece continues to the last, which includes all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Ligeti copes with the restrictions so resourcefully that you would scarcely notice that the cheerful third piece, Allegro con spirito, has a meagre allowance of only four notes and the charming “barrel-organ” Tempo di valse only five. The fifth and sixth pieces, based on six and seven notes respectively, make a contrasting pair, with a Hungarian-style lament on the one hand and a capricious little dance on the other. The seventh, Cantabile, molto legato, sustains an appealing melodic line over an ostinato which persists in a sullen kind of way until it takes on quasi-impressionist colouring at the end. Enshrined in the next three pieces, between two Vivace Hungarian dances, is an Adagio in memory of Bartók, beginning with muffled bell sounds and a lamenting melodic line with reverse dotted rhythms which animate an impassioned outcry in the middle. The closing piece, modelled on a Ricercar cromatico in Frescobaldi’s Messa degli Apostoli, is a serious-minded fugue based on a twelve-note theme with a chromatic scale as a counter subject.