Page 12 - NWS January 2025 Digital Playbill

PROGRAM Notes

See how they can enjoy life and give themselves up entirely to festivity. The picture of a
folk holiday. [The finale employs the folk song A Birch Stood in the Meadow, presented
simply by the woodwinds after the noisy flourish of the opening.] Hardly have we had
time to forget ourselves in the happiness of others when indefatigable Fate reminds
us once more of its presence. The other children of men are not concerned with us.
How merry and glad they all are. All their feelings are so inconsequential, so simple.
And do you still say that all the world is immersed in sorrow? There still is happiness,
simple, naive happiness. Rejoice in the happiness of others—and you can still live.
“There is not a single line in this Symphony that I have not felt in my whole being and
that has not been a true echo of the soul.”
© 2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
CONCERT ROMÂNESC (ROMANIAN CONCERTO)
György Ligeti (b. Transylvania Romania, 1923, d. Vienna, 2006)
Composed: 1951
Instrumentation: Piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons,
three horns, two trumpets, percussion, strings
Duration: Approximately 12 minutes
The son of Hungarian parents from Transylvania, György Ligeti spent his youth
in Cluj, Romania, where he attended the city’s conservatory, continuing his musical
studies in Budapest. In 1942, he was sent to a forced-labor camp, Hungary’s reluctant
acquiescence to Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism; the rest of his family was annihilated
when the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944 as they fled from defeat in the Soviet
Union. Following the war, Ligeti resumed his studies and, in 1950, joined the faculty
at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest as a harmony teacher. Until his escape from
Hungary in 1956, most of his published compositions were arrangements of
Romanian and Hungarian folk songs and Roma (Gypsy) melodies, while his more
serious works remained unpublished since they did not conform to the politicized
Soviet-style strictures.
Once Ligeti had settled in the West, his music changed dramatically. In the studios of the
West German Radio in Cologne, he learned the techniques of serialism and electronic
music, experimenting in both systems but ultimately rejecting both. His own freely atonal
style concentrated on shifting instrumental colors and textures. The Romanian Concerto,
however, belongs to Ligeti’s earlier Hungarian period. He writes: “In 1949…I learned how
to transcribe folk songs from wax cylinders at the Folklore Institute in Bucharest. Many
of these melodies stuck in my memory and led in 1951 to the composition of my Romanian
Concerto. However, not everything in it is genuinely Romanian as I also invented elements
in the spirit of the village bands. Often full of dissonances and ‘against the grain,’ the
peculiar way in which locals harmonized their music was regarded as incorrect by
Stalinist censors. In the fourth movement of my Romanian Concerto there is a passage
in which an F sharp is heard in the context of F major. This was reason enough for the
apparatchiks responsible for the arts to ban the entire piece.”

12 | New West Symphony