LIGETI UP AND DOWN

University President Prof. Dr. Jan Philipp Sprick will open the One of Us! festival and is enthusiastic about the multifaceted program that teachers and students have put together with the participation of numerous guests.

The special thing about it from his point of view: "I think that there are very few Ligeti events that express an almost personal affection like ours. Even if only a few of the participants have experienced Ligeti personally: There is a great emotional closeness to the composer in this festival!"

Sprick also creates closeness and draws the thread into the present. In the lead article of the university newspaper zwoelf, Sprick asks what the university can still learn today from a person like György Ligeti and how dealing with such a complex and elusive artistic personality can be used as a starting point for productive reflection on the future.
In addition, Ligeti is also a source of inspiration for Sprick personally: "From everything I have read about Ligeti and heard from contemporary witnesses, I have the impression that he was a very independent person. As the president of a large university, you always think that you no longer have this independence in view of the constraints. But I don't want to believe that this is necessarily the case. And a person like Ligeti helps me with that, even if I never got to know him."

A very special guest at our festival is Lukas Ligeti - the son of György Ligeti, who is also a composer himself. A portrait concert is dedicated to him. He will also be involved in the opening of the ligeti center and the pupils' concert.

His father played a major role in his artistic development. "I grew up in an environment where it was "normal" to listen to or even compose "strange" modern music. His constant striving for originality had a lasting influence on me. We also had many common interests and often exchanged ideas in intense conversations, so I probably also have a very special connection to his theoretical considerations."

When asked about a favorite piece: "No - my father hardly has a piece that I don't like, he was (sometimes a little too) self-critical and didn't publish anything half-baked. I could mention his Hamburg Horn Concerto as particularly interesting, as it perhaps receives less attention compared to some other pieces, but I think it is a work in which much of what he worked on for years has reached maturity, especially in terms of harmony."

Lukas Ligeti is well acquainted with many of his father's companions and so there will be some familiar encounters at the festival: "I'm looking forward to seeing everyone! I could perhaps mention Simha Arom in particular, but overall I'm very pleased to be part of this festival.

Portrait concert Lukas Ligeti on May 4 at 9 pm

Ligeti enjoyed listening to music from all over the world with his students. At the beginning of the 1980s, Roberto Sierra once brought him the recordings that Simha Arom had made with the Aka Pygmäen. Ligeti was fascinated by this music. He read Arom's analyses of the principles of African polyrhythms and used them in many of his works.

In 1984, the two met in person in Jerusalem and a close friendship developed. With the participation of African percussionists and a dancer, Arom will give a concert lecture on May 7 in which he will discuss his research work and make references to Ligeti's compositional work.

In addition to this event, we recommend the photo exhibition with pictures by Stern photographer Harald Schmitt, which Arom will introduce together with his long-time friend Reinhard Flender. The pictures show Arom during his field research, but also give an insight into the everyday life of the Pygmies.

Reinhard Flender - himself a composer - describes his first contact with this field of research as follows: "Since the 1980s, I have been fascinated by the discovery of composing purely rhythmic music outside the metric system and have loved and admired Ligeti's piano etudes. It remains a great challenge for music theory to develop a universal theory of rhythm alongside the theory of harmony. With his research, Simha Arom has contributed a great deal to laying the foundations on which we can continue to build."

Concert Lecture on May 7 at 5 p.m.
Photo exhibition on May 3 at 5.30 pm

"I would love to play it all the time..." Tanja Becker-Bender will be performing Ligeti's legendary violin concerto at the Forum on May 5 and 6. She has an intense relationship with this demanding work, which began exactly 10 years ago when she played it for the first time with the Deutsche Radiophilharmonie Saarbrücken: "I experience this work as physically gripping, every fiber in me wants to dance along. It is of an unheard-of emotional intensity, at the same time strikingly witty and rich in associations and with a humor that flashes up again and again.
Ligeti always pushes the performers to the limits of what is possible and a little beyond. Every part, not just the solo part, is peppered with the greatest difficulties. In one wind part, he personally writes "it is possible!" in the score, presumably because someone had told him otherwise. For all its immense power, the fragility, the risk, is always part of the composition, and you have to fully engage with it together."

Tanja Becker-Bender will be accompanied by Ensemble 13/14. The program also includes the Hamburg Concerto for Horn and Orchestra and the Chamber Concerto for 13 instrumentalists. She has great admiration for the students, some of whom are still very young: "The courage and dedication with which they have embarked on this project would certainly be in the spirit of Ligeti."

Concerts with the Ensemble 13/14 are on May 5 and May 6 in the Forum of the HfMT

"Many of Ligeti's students have written very rewarding, colorful, piano-friendly, effective piano music, and I have always found that an evening consisting of pieces by Ligeti and his class can be very entertaining." Hubertus Dreyer (himself a former Ligeti student) will be playing the piano part in Geschichten vom Apfel und vom Stamm on May 2 at the Forum.
How did this title actually come about? "Well, Ligeti strictly forbade us to imitate him. But some things were, so to speak, given by the desire to study with him, e.g. almost all of us are Mahler fans (and were before we came to Ligeti), critically well-disposed towards the avant-garde, surprisingly many once had a Hesse phase, which they later overcame, and I personally found to my astonishment, coming from a small town with little "avant-garde sense", that Ligeti had the same favorite books as I did."

Does the class from back then still exist? "Many of us have remained in close contact over the years, both professionally and privately, and we have just published a book together: György Ligeti Im Spiegel seiner Hamburger Kompositionsklasse The piano recital can also be seen or heard as part of a musical supplement to the book. A presentation of the many colors (and the "red threads") that make up Ligeti's composition class. The book encourages reflection on a number of compositional issues that are still relevant today. And it contains interesting facts about the composition class, a somewhat different view of Ligeti as well as gossip, anecdotes and lots of photos!"

Stories of the apple and the trunk on May 2 in the Forum

Teachers and students from all instrumental classes have put together a remarkable chamber music program. They will perform Ligeti's challenging work in a wide variety of formations. One of the ensembles performing is the Ensemble Elbwinds.

"It was a wish of ours to play this piece, we formed our quintet for this work," they reveal in an interview with Hannah Bernitt for the university newspaper. The piece in question is György Ligeti's Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet, written in 1953. "Everyone has respect for this piece, so we thought: we're not afraid,
we'll just start with Ligeti. Professionalism and discipline are essential, but not only. "Finding the characters with courage and self-confidence" is a playing instruction that is quite demanding and requires a lot of practice."

Before the Six Bagatelles can be heard in the Forum, several performances of this work have already taken place. "This piece changes from performance to performance," explains the quintet. "We become braver and also braver to make mistakes. Working on a piece like Sechs Bagatellen definitely welds us together. We wanted to sound like one person."

Chamber concert on May 4 at the Forum

Let's call it a worthy, posthumous birthday present...
Ligeti had wished for a computer music center during the appointment negotiations for his professorship in Hamburg, but unfortunately nothing came of it.

Thanks to funding from the federal-state initiative "Innovative University", the ligeti center has now been realized. The name is not only a memorial to the birthday boy. It is also an acronym and stands for 'Laboratoriesfor Innovationand Social Developmentthrough the Transfer of Ideas'.

The opening is on May 3. The new premises can be explored and the partners will introduce themselves. In addition to the University of Music and Drama, the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) and the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) are also involved. Together, the four institutions pursue an interdisciplinary research approach and rely heavily on cross-fertilization in teaching.

Project leader Prof. Dr. Georg Hajdu is particularly pleased that the legendary Stanford professor John Chowning is able to attend. "He did the planning for the original center for Ligeti and was a close friend of his. He will be present at the Tape Music concert that evening with two pieces alongside Ligeti's Articulation. And in our Production Lab, which also functions as a concert hall, we will also have two musical contributions.
I myself am currently taking care of portrait photos and reproductions of works by Ligeti and Chowning, which we want to hang in the entrance areas of the ligeti center. For me, they represent everything that the center will stand for in the future, both in person and in their work: Music, theater, media, medicine and technology in teaching, research and transfer."

Opening of the ligeti center on May 3 at Veritaskai in Harburg

We warmly recommend our university newspaper zwoelf to deepen your thoughts and gain further insights into the life and work of György Ligeti. It was published in April and dedicates its entire twelve-page thematic section to Ligeti.
You can read the newspaper online or order a printed copy to be sent to your home free of charge. Simply send us an e-mail with your postal address to redaktion.zwoelf[at]hfmt-hamburg.de

We could go on, but the newsletter already resembles a roll of papyrus. Our enthusiasm got the better of us and we hope that we were able to infect you a little, because we hope to be able to share this diverse program with you.
On our homepage you will find the complete festival program

We look forward to seeing you there!
Your HfMT