György Ligeti Concert Românesc
Folk music and festive twists in a banned work. Ryan Bancroft conducts.
About the video
- Filmed 25 May 2023.
- The video is approximately 14 minutes.
Concert Românesc is far removed from the groundbreaking works György Ligeti composed after fleeing Hungary in 1956. Instead, its roots lie in his Transylvanian upbringing and Romanian folk music – but it also tells a story of Stalinist cultural policy in Hungary.
As a child, Ligeti encountered Romanian folk music and particularly remembered New Year festivities with wild, masked musicians, violins and Romanian bagpipes. Later, he worked on transcribing folk songs and used some of the melodies in Concert Românesc, alongside music of his own written in a folk-music idiom.
Ligeti was also fascinated by the distinctive harmonies and dissonances of village musicians. In the finale, for example, he sets an F sharp against F major. Today, it may sound harmless, but in Hungary in the early 1950s it was provocative enough. According to Ligeti himself, harmonic frictions of this kind were the reason the authorities banned the work.
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The music
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György Ligeti Concert Românesc
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Participants
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Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra
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Ryan Bancroft conductor
