Miranda Cuckson on Ligeti's Violin Concerto (Centaur Records Album Release)

Описание: To download/purchase/stream: https://naxos.lnk.to/BaldiniOrchestra...
Release Date (on CD and all digital platforms): August 6, 2021

Christian Baldini (1978-)
1 Elapsing Twilight Shades (2008, rev. 2012) 7:26

Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994)
Chain 2 (1985)
Dialogue for Violin and Orchestra (17:52)
2 I Ad libitum 3:47
3 II A battuta 4:57
4 III Ad libitum 4:37
5 IV A battuta 4:31

György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1989, rev.1993) (28:57)
6 I Praeludium 4:11
7 II Aria, Hoquetus, Choral 8:00
8 III Intermezzo 2:31
9 IV Passacaglia 6:39
10 V Appassionato 7:36

Edgard Varèse (1883-1965)
11 Amériques (1918-21, rev. 1927) 23:26
TOTAL PLAYING TIME 77:41

Munich Radio Orchestra, Christian Baldini, conductor (1)
UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, Christian Baldini, conductor (2-11)
Maximilian Haft, violin (2-5)
Miranda Cuckson, violin (6-10)

Unedited Live Recordings
1 „Award Concert Weekend of the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award“ - Felsenreitschule, Salzburg Festival, April 29, 2012. (Salzburg, Austria) ORF Recording Team: Hannes Eichmann (Recording Producer), Hannes Gstrein (Recording Engineer)
2-11 Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis. Recording Engineer: Stephen Bingen
1-11 Mastering Engineer: David Bowles
Photos: (c) wildbild (Munich Radio Orchestra & Christian Baldini), (c) Sam Zeng (UC Davis Symphony Orchestra & Christian Baldini), (c) J Henry Fair (Miranda Cuckson), Christian Henking (Maximilian Haft)
Cover design by Erin Low

Notes About the Program ~ by Christian Baldini

György Ligeti is one of the composers (from all eras included) that I love and admire more than any others. His sense of originality, his constant search for a genuine voice and his exceptional and sensual imagination are all very inspiring to me. Despite the rigid musical training he initially received growing up in Hungary under the 'Iron Curtain' (or precisely because of it) he managed to revolutionize the music world in ways that most of his contemporaries could have only dreamed of. He never felt pigeonholed in a single category, even if at times he was obsessed with certain sonic spaces or procedures. The New York Times published an interesting obituary in 2006, which expressed in Ligeti's own words his dilemma and his constant search: "I am in a prison," Ligeti explained. "One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape."

Musicologists and theorists often discuss and praise his micropolyphony, his textures and his structures. As a performer what I find even more fascinating about his music is his sense of balance and color, crafted with an undeniably impeccable technique, and his often misunderstood (or not always perceived) sense of humor. His music is free from all the expectations or rules that most composers had set for themselves in terms of what "contemporary music" was supposed to mean. In his Violin Concerto (which is one of his last large works), Ligeti makes reference to polyphonic music from the past with his own stamp and harmonic language including the "Hoquetus" technique, which was developed in the 13th and 14th centuries. He also includes an ocarina choir (he asks the wind players to leave their instruments aside for a while to play these ocarinas of different sizes instead), creating a ghostly and most surprising effect particularly in the second and fourth movements. The ocarina is an ancient type of vessel flute, which dates back up to 12,000 years, and was transformed into a modern instrument in the 19th century by Giuseppe Donati near Bologna. The violin soloist is at times treated as a mega-instrument: there are two members of the orchestra whose instruments are carefully de-tuned (in a microtonal way) so as to precisely surround the violin soloist with an ethereal microtonal cloud. Ligeti uses the natural harmonic series to achieve this: a solo violin in the orchestra (played by Devon Bradshaw in this recording) and a solo viola (played here by Jonathan Spatola-Knoll) are cunningly tuned to specific partials of the harmonic series of the orchestra's double bass. This confirms once more how Ligeti achieved complex sounding worlds through simple means.

As Jay Campbell writes in his 2016 program notes for the Metropolitan Museum series: "At a gut level, what ultimately has kept me coming back to Ligeti's music is its humanity. It takes the deftest hand to convey the complex spectrum of the modern psyche in abstract music. On one hand, urbane wit, or sometimes Kafkaesque absurdity; on the other, a sublime terror of infinity, the anxiety of human imperfection versus mechanical precision, the breathless expectation watching a precariously balanced tightrope walker." And it is precisely with an über-violinist like Miranda Cuckson that you can allow yourself to dream of walking on this sonic tightrope.