Celebrating the Music of Ligeti: ‘The Incarnation of a Free Spirit’

If you are going to salute the composer Gyorgy Ligeti, you might as well ask one of his most dedicated and perceptive collaborators to lend a hand.

Ligeti, who died in 2006, and the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard were more than artistic partners, more than a composer and a sympathetic interpreter; they were friends. So the New York Philharmonic can surely have found no more suitable a soloist than Aimard to help observe the centennial of Ligeti’s birth.

“Ligeti was certainly one of the most seminal composers of the latter half of the 20th century,” said Gary Ginstling, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic. “It’s important, and an honor, for the Philharmonic to celebrate his contributions in collaboration with one of his greatest champions, Pierre-Laurent Aimard.”

And the Philharmonic, which began its Ligeti tribute a couple of weeks ago with a program featuring the “Concert Romanesc” and “Mifiso la Sodo” under the conductor David Robertson, is going to keep Aimard busy.

On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Aimard, 66, will join Susanna Mälkki at David Geffen Hall for performances of Ligeti’s Piano Concerto. He has recorded that work three times, if you count a fascinating documentary he made with Pierre Boulez and Ensemble Intercontemporain.

But if anything, Aimard’s relationship with Ligeti’s formidable, witty Études is closer still; many of them were written with him in mind. For a Saturday Nightcap concert, Aimard and a fellow pianist, Joachim Kühn, will draw links from selected Études to jazz. And on Tuesday, back at Geffen, Aimard will connect the Études and other works to Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy. The Philharmonic, in addition, is mounting an archival exhibition that includes manuscripts lent to it for the occasion.

Aimard talked in a recent interview about his relationship with Ligeti, who lost most of his family during the Holocaust and fled Hungary during the uprising of 1956, and offered some reflections on the composer’s place in music today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Take me back to when you and Ligeti met, in the 1980s. What struck you about him?

I met him at a rehearsal of “Aventures” and “Nouvelles Aventures,” one of his most eccentric compositions, and I was struck by both his freedom and imagination, and his wish to realize every sound product in the most achieved way. This mix of inner freedom and care in craftsmanship was extraordinary. He was always inspiring in the way he spoke about his musical visions, with astonishing metaphors, ideas, suggestions, and at the same time he was very demanding, always fighting for quality.

Ligeti came to maturity at a particularly turbulent time in Hungarian history. Did his music have a particular message, to you?

Which music doesn’t carry a message? First of all, all the discoveries, an extraordinary era of discoveries in science, all possible fields of knowledge. Then, it was also a period of great discovery for artists. He was in contact with everything that was new in any artistic territory and would absorb that as well. But also, he was a part of the history of his century, and was part of it quite dramatically, quite tragically. This part, this dark dimension, was always in him.

Some of his music has that sense of tragedy to it, but also a sense of humor.

Definitely. It was music that never fell into pathos, because he was too attracted by life. So, all the antidotes against pathos were there, including humor, and sometimes dark humor.

It’s hard to speak generally about influence, but in what ways does Ligeti’s music have an influence on composers today?

He belonged to a generation of avant-gardists who opened hundreds of doors, and consequently, yes, he influenced generations of very different creators. His music is not avant-garde anymore; pages have been turned in between. Even if our era is not an avant-garde era artistically at all, on the contrary, he is an extraordinary, living part of the past. But the past can still face us with very appropriate questions, I think.

What kinds of questions does Ligeti ask?

Well, all the destabilizing ones that he does in his creations.

During your time with the New York Philharmonic, you are putting Ligeti in the context of folk music, jazz and the classical tradition. Where did that extraordinary range in his music come from?

He was an open-minded man who loved and shared independence, paid for that at a very high price in his life, but lived like that on a daily basis. For me, he was the incarnation of a free spirit, really. One could never manipulate him. He would never follow models; he would create all the time.

All the Études are so different in their own way, yet so characteristically him.

Well, they are different because he had a lot of fantasy, and was interested in many layers of our past and our present, and consequently incorporated a lot in his music. I don’t think there is a dramaturgy that doesn’t work among them. If so, he would have left it in the wastepaper basket.

Do you have a favorite among the Études? Is there one that you think is particularly characteristic of your work with him, or just of him?

Of course, these possible favorites change; the more I work on them the more I discover the richness, the way how he could balance and compose, extremely carefully, each identity: identity of textures, identity of movements, of polyrhythms. I’m not a preacher of this music, I’m an interpreter, so I try to have the closest and best possible contact with each of the pieces I try to make present onstage.

How would you describe the Piano Concerto for somebody who does not know it?

I would avoid describing it too briefly, the work is so rich. It’s a work that renews polyphony through fascinating polyrhythm, and a piece in which his own fantasy reinvents the relationship between the soloist and the group of players in five different ways. There are five movements in the piece.

Do you think of it as a kind of chamber concerto?

It’s a chamber concerto with highly virtuosic soloists, a bunch of them, because the part for each instrumentalist is challenging. So, this is, let’s say, for a group of kamikaze.

It hasn’t been played by the New York Philharmonic for seven years, and only twice in the history of the orchestra. Do you think that is because of that difficulty?

It is true that it is challenging, and I’m not the only one who has played this piece who thinks that, in terms of challenging concertos, this one is really at the top. I don’t think that the difficulty is a problem; the difficulty is a challenge. The question mark is more, I think, understanding the language. When a new language appears, it takes time to be absorbed. For instance, a great majority of my young colleagues play some, if not several, of the Ligeti Études. So, it has taken a bit of time — but not so much.