Le Grand Macabre - Ligeti by Ligeti, Fri 07 Dec 2018, From (2018/2018), Conductor Matthias Pintscher, Philharmonie de Paris, Paris, France

In this first part of the portrait of the great Hungarian master, a brief overview of his lyrical and vocal work. The Intercontemporain Ensemble and the Paris Conservatory Orchestra are joined by the Hungarian National Choir. György Ligeti does nothing like the others. When he took on the challenge of opera in 1974, not only did he take on an incredible subject, half farcical, half tragic, inspired by the play La Balade du Grand Macabre by the Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode, but he composes his music in the manner of a patchwork of operatic quotations, borrowed indifferently from Monteverdi, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Offenbach... Let's admit that the plot lends itself to this, since we follow a funny of a character who claims to be death himself and announces in every tone the end of the world. Regarding the end of the world, a music critic will see in Ligeti's Requiem (1965) an “end of the world seen from below”. It is certainly these airs of desolation that pushed Stanley Kubrick to use passages in his film 2001, A Space Odyssey .