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The recording is of Ligeti?s Requiem, Apparitions and San Francisco Polyphony, said László Gőz, head of the recording?s label Budapest Music Center (BMC).
Ligeti was interested in composing a requiem from a young age. He made the first sketches in 1953, while still in Hungary. He returned to the subject ten years later, after emigrating to the West, and the requiem premiered in Stockholm in 1965.
The Requiem is scored for a twenty-part choir, a large orchestra and soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists. The work?s central theme is a musical rendition of the hymn Dies irae by Thomas of Celano. This was a unique precursor for Ligeti?s opera Grand Macabre which followed a decade later.
Apparitions occupies a special place in the oeuvre of Ligeti. This was his first instrumental work following his emigration to the West, and also the first work to win him a noticeable degree of international recognition. Its world premiere took place in June 1960 at the Cologne festival of the International Society for New Music.
If Apparitions was the beginning of Ligeti?s ?micropolyphonic? technique and style, and the Requiem was the culmination of it, then San Francisco Polyphony (as well as being the moment before a change in style) was the last stage on the path towards a more transparent, more contoured ?new polyphony?. The piece was written for the sixtieth anniversary of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and premiered in January 1975 under the baton of Seiji Ozawa.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
