György Ligeti

Yeah, exactly.

Christine, can we start about the blank screen on 2001? Because I noticed even before the MGM kind of title comes up, there is this rather uncomfortable Ligeti piece, which kind of builds up on an absolutely blank screen.

Can you talk a bit about that? Sure.

It's an interesting

And when he gets to 2001, he's still ostensibly working with Alex North, but we'll get into that later, I'm sure.

But what he ends up with is a score full of preexistent music.

And one of the things that he does is he sort of latches onto Ligeti's music as a sonic signature for the other, this frightening, unknown thing.

And I think by starting the film with this in the dark, before anything happens, before you see anything on screen, it almost puts you into this, oh my gosh, what's going to happen kind of feeling.

There are things that I found confusing and I probably should have like gone in with a greater understanding of Oscar Wilde's history or something but I there were many things to admire and the dancers were great and Adam Elms is just Adam Elms is just the bee's knees anyways moving right along Um, okay, here's another New York City ballet program they did, Continuum.

Speaking of Christopher Wheldon, um, another dance with much to admire, this is when Christopher was in his Ligeti, Ligeti, Ligeti phase after Polyphonia, and he made this dance at San Francisco Ballet.

And I got to talk to Christopher in the lobby afterwards, and he was talking about parts of it that he loves.

And I was like, that is, now that is, I love to talk to a choreographer who can feel a sense of love for their dance or a part of their dance.

this is gonna sound corny as hell but like it's embarrassing even to admit but like i kind of got into beethoven through copper

orange i'm like i'm with you i'm with you you know electronic music And modern composers like Ligeti.

The first time I'd ever heard of Ligeti, it was 2001.

That leads you through a whole other, you know, down a whole other track.

You know, I just love the idea that this set could get into the hands of a young person who hasn't seen these films before, might be coming to them for the first time.

But these composers would rather it be 100% to 0% that you are just someone who plays the music.

But then you have some other composers, such as Penderecki, Cage, Ligeti, where what you get are suggested patterns, sometimes detailed, sometimes very vague.

And then you have the freedom to do whatever it is you want to do with that pattern in a certain amount of time.

This is almost equal partnership.

I think they start looking back on their own life and perhaps this looking back is extended back into music history.

And you see this with, with many composers, even through the, the 20th and 21st centuries, Ligeti being a very interesting example of a composer really rediscovering earlier principles such as, you know, tonality or, or consonance, um, in their later years.

So I think Beethoven is one of the most interesting early examples of this, and I think in the fugue he found lots of potential, not only for complexity, but also for drama and the way in which the inherent transformation in a fugue, the way in which it re-digests material that is presented at the beginning, really had a, a kind of spark, I think, for Beethoven.

He saw in it the potential to communicate a kind of journey of transformation where we are the same person in some sense, we are dealing with the same material at the end of the journey, but the journey has changed us profoundly.

But I do think, uh, whether it was a Spielberg suggestion or Williams' own idea, there are all these little nods to Kubrick, Kubrick's use of music.

The, the kind of Khachaturian music at the beginning of AI, which is very reflective of 2001, um, the choral music, which feels like L- Ligeti's music in 2001.

Um, there's, there's these little nods that are, are obviously intentional.

And then of course the most famous, um, anecdote about there being some reference to Der Rosenkavalier that Kubrick made, that they, they knew it needed to go there somewhere.

Uh, but yeah, I think, um, musically, even, even the opening, even though it's, it, it's an obvious sort of allusion to something that Kubrick might have, uh, put in one of his films, it, it still feels like it has John Williams' fingerprints on it.

I remember back in the day, one reviewer here in Italy actually spent a, a- at least one paragraph of the review demolishing John Williams' [laughs] approach to the film.

Like, he, he, he really hated the fact when he, he nodded to Khachaturian or, or Ligeti, a- and he w- it was seen from this critic like kind of a sacrilege.

You know, here comes the obvious John Williams ripping off Ligeti and Khachaturian and Strauss and whatever, when instead the things are much more nuanced.

So throughout the season there are many ways where we're exploring this theme through early music, we have some baroque music, we have a world premiere.

Uh, we have also programs that kind of trace a musical idea from one composer to the next, and we s- kind of see how this idea unfolds and evolves throughout the concert season.

So you're starting in October.

Our first concert will feature the Poesis String Quartet.

They were the grand prize winners at the 2025 Banff International String Quartet Competition.

This competition is one of the most prestigious competitions on the planet, and the fact that we are able to present the Poesis here in the Capital Region is, is just a wonderful, wonderful thing that we are so excited about.

They are bringing an amazing program, Beethoven, Prokofiev, and then a contemporary work by composer Skye McLeay called Many, Many Cadences, as well as a work by Michi Wiancko, uh, the violist and member of the Kronos String Quartet, Path of Many Water.

That period of time that they're in town they're gonna be doing some outreach programs?

On today's date in 1992, one of the strangest, and some would say most strikingly original, violin concertos of the late twentieth century had its premiere in Cologne.

It was written by the Transylvanian-born Hungarian composer George Ligeti.

Ligeti became famous in the West when some of his music appeared in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001.

Kubrick used Ligeti's music to evoke the eerie and empty vastness of outer space.

And in fact, Ligeti was fascinated by the sounds that traditional orchestral instruments make when pressed to the extreme limits of their range, their own sonic outer limits.

There's some of that in Ligeti's 1992 Violin Concerto, plus a dash of the traditionally melancholic Hungarian strain familiar from the music of Ligeti's famous compatriot Béla Bartók.

Finally, tossed in for good measure, is Ligeti's puckish fondness for thumbing his nose at life, the universe, and traditional concert hall décor.

[orchestral music] As if to counterbalance his melancholic strain, or maybe just express it in a more surprising way, there's a good deal of the clown in Ligeti, who includes a chorus of ocarinas in the score of his Violin Concerto.