1 Ligeti String Quartet
A programme of 20th-century classics from the Ligeti Quartet closes the Sound festival’s weekend-long focus on the contemporary string quartet. Bartók’s majestic Fifth Quartet provides the stylistic benchmark, with the Hungarian thread followed through into early Ligeti (his first quartet, Métamorphoses Nocturnes) and late Kurtág (the Six Moments Musicaux); while for something very different there’s Xenakis’s tangled, confrontational Tetras.
2 Les Siècles
François-Xavier Roth founded his historically aware band to play the French orchestral repertoire of the last four centuries on the instruments for which it was written. Yet music from the turn of the 20th century has always been the central focus, and that’s epitomised by this programme of Debussy and Ravel. It includes Debussy’s Jeux and La Mer, as well as Ravel’s Mother Goose ballet, which will be by supplemented by Grégoire Pont’s illustrations.
3 From Melodious Lay
The first performance of this BBC Symphony Orchestra commission provides the latest taster for Brett Dean’s impending Hamlet opera, due to be premiered at Glyndebourne next summer. Subtitled A Hamlet Diffraction, From Melodious Lay takes passages from various surviving versions of Shakespeare’s play as the basis for an orchestral poem with soprano and tenor soloists that explores the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia. It’s “not an attempt at explanation or analysis”, says Dean, rather “a poetic and musical exploration of colliding worlds”.
