Spatial Explorations

Spatial Explorations By Leon Botstein Written for the concert Spacial Explorations, performed on June 1, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. This final concert of our 2007-2008 season was inspired in part by the death of György Ligeti, who died two years ago on June 12. His biography can serve as a mirror…

Tōru Takemitsu, Cassiopeia By Frank J. Oteri Written for the concert Spacial Explorations, performed on June 1, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. Percussionists have only recently emerged as viable soloists with orchestras. Throughout the twentieth century there have been a few top-shelf concertos for marimba—including works by Milhaud, Creston, and Takemitsu—and even occasional…

Andrzej Panufnik, Sinfonia di Sfere By Peter Laki Written for the concert Spacial Explorations, performed on June 1, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. Andrzej Panufnik and his friend Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994) were the two leading figures in Polish music in the years immediately following World War II. After his defection in 1954, Panufnik…

Rued Langgaard, Sfaerernes musik (Music of the Spheres) By Peter Laki Written for the concert Spacial Explorations, performed on June 1, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Denmark apparently had room for only one composer—Carl Nielsen (1865-1931). The author of the “Inextinguishable” Symphony completely dominated the…

György Ligeti, Apparitions By Paul Griffiths Written for the concert Spacial Explorations, performed on June 1, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. When Ligeti left Hungary, in 1956, he took with him his scores and also his hopes—in particular, his hopes for a kind of music corresponding to a dream he had had as…

György Ligeti, Atmosphères By Paul Griffiths Written for the concert Spacial Explorations, performed on June 1, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. What Ligeti heard in his Apparitions was the possibility of composing “a canon so dense that it creates a texture, a static tissue.” Gesture and incident could now fade, to leave textures…