Item: Metamorphosis Ligeti
Rating: 5

Metamorphosis Ligeti

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Artist: Quatuor Diotima

Genre: Classical

Label: Pentatone

This is an album of performing extremes applied to music of compositional extremes. And Metamorphosis is a perfect title for it.

György Ligeti left three works for string quartet. The earliest, two folksy movements, an Andante and Allegretto, dates from 1950, the year after he graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, in Budapest. His First String Quartet (Métamorphoses nocturnes), written in 1953 and 1954, has clear connections with Bartók.

Quatuor Diotima’s peculiar but illuminating note talks of the composer founding, then melting and smelting his own art and reaching “absolute dizziness, no marks nor borders, a sense of stormy similitude”

Though the music is no less rigorously conceived than any quartet by Bartók, it is altogether more fantastical, as if by a Bartók who is high as a kite. Quatuor Diotima play it with a zest so driven and a dynamic range so wide that the effect is often gloriously surreal.

It was clear that the composer would find it difficult to deal with the constraints of communist Hungary, and he fled to the West after the failed revolution of 1956. The Second Quartet, composed in 1968, is a classic of the 1960s avant-garde. Quatuor Diotima’s peculiar but illuminating note talks of the composer founding, then melting and smelting his own art, and reaching “absolute dizziness, no marks nor borders, a sense of stormy similitude”.