CANCELLED: Symphoniker Hamburg / Timothy Ridout / Sylvain Cambreling

The Rumanian composer György Ligeti, for many years professor of composition in Hamburg, wrote the following about his turbulent early work »Concert Românesc«: »I spent the years 1949/50 in Rumania, studying at the Folk Music Institute in Bucharest, after which I took part in several trips to record folk music both Rumanian and Hungarian. This four-movement orchestral concerto is based on many different Rumanian folk tunes that I recorded, but most of them are taken from wax cylinders and gramophone records in the archive of the Bucharest Folk Music Institute«.

For many years, Ligeti’s thinking as a composer revolved around the music of Béla Bartók. They had a common goal, namely to transport folk tradition into the avant-garde. Bartók was still working on his Concerto for Viola and Orchestra when he died on 26 September 1945, and the score lay unfinished on the desk in his New York apartment. Fortunately for posterity, his erstwhile student Tibor Serly took up the material and completed the work.

By way of contrast, Mussorgsky’s »Pictures at an Exhibition« were »thought through to the end« in an entirely different way by Maurice Ravel. The French composer wrote one of the best-known orchestral versions, turning his Russian colleague’s surprisingly austere piano original into a vibrant and effervescent score.