Composer
Biography:
GYÖRGY LIGETI, born into a Jewish-Hungarian family in Transylvania in 1923, learned to play the piano in 1938 and tried his hand at composing a year later. In 1941 he was forbidden to study physics as a Jew, after which he studied music at the Conservatory of Klausenburg (Cluj-Napoca) and later in Budapest, first organ and theory. His teachers include Sándor Veress, who is stylistically related to Bartók, and Ferenc Farkas.
Ligeti quickly developed into a phenomenal technician and meticulous master of musical matter, for whom no future challenge should be too great, no uncharted territory uncharted territory. He was not a speculative spirit, but a practical spirit with all his visionary development of the structural and tonal, who did not serve ideas and theories, but made them serve his work.
Nothing was so repugnant to Ligeti as the routine of pathetic expressiveness. He was cool-headed, but his music inevitably develops a highly expressive language, though its form is only occasionally based on organic principles. From 1973 to 89 Ligeti was a sought-after professor of composition in Hamburg, who throughout his life studied the design principles of the archaic traditions of world music without adopting their sounding surface. György Ligeti, who had a lasting influence on and inspired subsequent composers of a wide variety of styles, died in Vienna on June 12, 2006.
Albums:
Cello Concerto - Mysteries of the Macabre - Piano Concerto:
Salzburg Biennale – Festival for New Music 2009:
