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Work of the Week – György Ligeti: Lontano

To start off the new year, the music world will celebrate the 100th birthday of the composer György Ligeti. Even though the actual anniversary will not take place until May, this January will mark the start of celebrations involving numerous performances of Ligeti’s works. The Zurich Ballet takes a special look at the orchestral composition Lontano with choreography by Christian Spuck. The collaboration of this piece will celebrate its premiere at the Zurich Opera House on 14 January 2023. 

Ballet with Ligeti's masterpiece Lontano in the centenary year

The Italian word ‘lontano’, translating as ‘far away’ or ‘distant’, describes the style in which this work is performed. Ligeti’s music has a distinctive character with an often eerie atmosphere created by layering very quiet sounds that build and eventually merge together. In Lontano, he creates gripping tensions that ties similarities to films by famous directors such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.

As an alternative to the serial music of his contemporaries, Ligeti created a stylistic device that he described as ‘Micropolyphony’. This compositional technique involves overlapping many musical lines which move in different tempos and rhythms to form tone clusters. For Ligeti, bar lines are only used to help the orientation of the musicians as they do not mark any metric focal points.

The “harmonic crystallisation” within the area of sonority leads to an intervallic-harmonic thought process which is thereby radically different from traditional and also atonal harmony.  Technically speaking, this is achieved with the aid of polyphonic methods: fictive harmonies emerge from a complex vocal woven texture, gradual opacity and new crystallisation are the result of discrete alterations in the individual parts. The polyphony in itself is almost imperceptible but its harmonic effect represents the intrinsic musical action: what is on the page is polyphony, but what is heard is harmony. (György Ligeti)

As a ballet, Lontano can be experienced at the Zurich Opera House on a total of ten evenings until 11 February 2023. In concert, numerous performances of the orchestral work are also on the international schedules for the coming months including Freiburg, Ludwigsburg, Helsinki and Hamburg in March and Vienna in April. 

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photo: KonKoratio

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