Orchestral concert: Ligeti, Ginastera, Nielsen

The concert conducted by the Grammy Award-winning ambassador of 20th and 21st century music will span several continents. David Robertson is not only renowned for creating a good atmosphere between himself and the orchestras he works with, his outstanding musicality and his clean gestures, but also for his imaginative, adventurous and exciting programs. The Director of Conducting Studies at the Juilliard School will open his concert with a short but enlightening and entertaining piece from Ligeti's student years, and close the first half with one of the most-performed concertos in the harp repertoire, the Argentinian Ginastera’s Harp Concerto. Xavier de Maistre, the soloist of the evening is “capable of realizing a remarkable range of nuance”, according to Gramophone. The concert will conclude with a heroic struggle composed into a symphony, á la Nielsen.

David Robertson directed the America premier of György Ligeti’s Mifiso la sodo composed for chamber orchestra in the fall of 2023. The conductor found the piece very entertaining, displaying some details that later became trademarks of the mature composer. In his view, Ligeti explored things in his imagination that did not exist at all in music at that time. Composed during his years at the Liszt Academy in 1948 and reworked three years later, Mifiso la sodo is full of virtuoso ornamentation, playful accents and subtle musical wit. The title itself is a pun, as Ligeti created a fictional Italian phrase from solmization notes.

“Subjective nationalism” – this was how Alberto Ginastera called his creative period when his harp concerto was composed in 1956. For a while, after embracing folk traditions more directly and before joining serialism, the composer experimented with combining elements of folk music with contemporary musical language. The choice of the solo instrument is self-evident: the harp plays an important role in Argentinian folk music, and in a symphony orchestra, the sound of the harp is closest to the sound of the iconic Argentinian guitar. The first and third movements of the concerto conjure up malambo, the dance of Argentinian cowboys, the gauchos. As opposed to tango, which is about the relationship between a man and a woman, malambo is an exclusively male dance – this time played by the queen of instruments. Between two rhythmic movements rich in special effects, there is some nocturnal music reminiscent of Bartók, tinged with celesta.

The atmosphere of Symphony No. 4 of Danish composer Carl Nielsen is strongly permeated by the horrors of the First World War. The piece composed in 1915 is entitled “The Inextinguishable”, but rather than referring to the struggle of a specific hero, the composer intended it as a philosophical guideline. "Music is life itself, and as life it is inextinguishable," Nielsen wrote, emphasizing that his piece had no program. The most important players of the orchestra with an enormous brass section are the two timpani. With some exaggeration, the composition is their fight. The symphony consists of four attacca movements, and we can hear a constant struggle throughout these four movements: a struggle for the key and for the survival of a recurring motto theme.