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Kevin Bazzana: Victoria Symphony pays tribute to composer Ligeti

What: Ligeti Festival. When/where: March 21, 27, 28, and 29; various times and venues. Tickets: Free to $20; festival pass $25. Call 250-385-6515; March 28 tickets also online at voxhumanachoir.ca. Details: victoriasymphony.ca/ligetifestival.

What: Ligeti Festival.

When/where: March 21, 27, 28, and 29; various times and venues.

Tickets: Free to $20; festival pass $25. Call 250-385-6515; March 28 tickets also online at voxhumanachoir.ca.

Details: victoriasymphony.ca/ligetifestival.

 

For the second season in a row, the Victoria Symphony is sponsoring a festival honouring a major composer of the recent past: György Ligeti. Last season's festival was prompted by the John Cage centenary, but this time there is no comparable excuse: Ligeti was born in 1923 and died in 2006. To their credit, the orchestra and its music director, Tania Miller, have apparently chosen to celebrate Ligeti simply because he is worth celebrating.

The four concerts of the Ligeti Festival will include works spanning more than 40 years of his career, some of his most famous among them; the result promises to be a great introduction to a fascinating, stylistically diverse body of work by an idiosyncratic and unclassifiable musical explorer.

As in the Cage 100 festival, the Victoria Symphony has involved other performing organizations around the city.

Tomorrow, Sonic Lab, the University of Victoria’s contemporary-music ensemble, will offer a program including Ligeti’s wildly inventive, splendidly strange Violin Concerto (1989-93), with Müge Büyükçelen-Badel, a member of the Victoria Symphony and the Emily Carr String Quartet, as soloist (8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, by donation; pre-concert talk 7:30).

The ECSQ’s own concert next Thursday, March 27, will include several works by Ligeti (7:30 p.m., Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, $20). The full ensemble will perform Andante and Allegretto (1950), while its two lowest-pitched members will get the spotlight in short unaccompanied works: the hypnotic “Loop” movement from the Viola Sonata (1991-94), and the two-movement Cello Sonata (1948-53).

The March 28 concert of the chamber choir Vox Humana will include Ligeti's Lux aeterna (1966), for 16-part mixed choir a cappella (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $20/$15, 25 and under free).

And the festival will culminate on March 29, in the Victoria Symphony’s concert, conducted by Miller (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $20; pre-concert talk 7:00). The program will include Ligeti’s Ramifications, for strings (1968-69), and the bold, ambitious Piano Concerto (1985-88), featuring a soloist, Roger Admiral, who specializes in contemporary music (he lives in Camrose, Alta., and has played here before).

The biggest talking point on March 29, however, will surely be the curtain-raiser: Ligeti's Poème symphonique (1962), for 100 metronomes — but more on that droll bit of avant-gardery next week.

(Incidentally, the orchestra will offer a sort of encore to its festival on April 7, when it will perform the folk-music-infused Concert Românesc, from 1951, in its final Legacy Series concert.)

Ligeti was Hungarian —hence the accent on the first syllable of his surname —though he fled Hungary in the wake of the failed revolution of 1956 and subsequently lived in Vienna, Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg.

If you don’t know his music from concerts or recordings, you probably know it from the movies, most famously those of Stanley Kubrick. 2001: A Space Odyssey drew prominently on four Ligeti pieces, including Lux aeterna (in the moon-bus sequence) and another choral work, Requiem, which supplied that ee-yee-yee-yee music associated with the alien monolith.

Kubrick used Ligeti’s music without permission and Ligeti sued. They eventually settled and Kubrick drew again on Ligeti (and generously compensated him) in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.

Incidentally, Ligeti is the focus but not the only attraction of the festival; each concert includes other contemporary music.

Sonic Lab, for example, will also perform Luciano Berio’s evocative chamber piece O King, a memorial to the recently slain Martin Luther King, Jr., and Verticale muto (2009), a big piece for very unusual forces by a Vienna-based Italian, Pierluigi Billone.

The Emily Carr String Quartet's concert will include a good deal of Canadian music — two quartets by Rudolf Komorous, a retired UVic professor; a violin solo by Michael Oesterle, the Victoria Symphony’s composer-in-residence; a piece by the Serbian-born Ana Sokolovi, who lives in Montreal, but also some little duets by Ligeti’s countryman Bartók.

Vox Humana’s program, characteristically, will showcase contemporary composers from around the world — mostly Eastern Europeans (Schnittke, Gorecki, Pärt), but also Vancouver-based Rodney Sharman and Julian Wachner, the music director of a high-profile New York cathedral and a major figure in several worlds-early-music, new-music, choral, opera.

And the Victoria Symphony's own concert will be filled out with substantial orchestral works by Sokolovi and Toronto-based Paul Frehner.