Customer Reviews

Ligeti: Le Grand Macabre [Gyorgy Ligeti Edition Vol 8]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Gyorgy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, two hours of absolutely inspired musical mayhem, is one of the five or so most important works of the century. As such, a new release of this 1977 work, in a revised version (1997) conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, and in English no less (the original was in German) is a major musical event by default. Is it better than the old German version on Wergo, conducted by Elgar Howarth? Not necessarily. My impression, for instance, is that Eirian Davies' Gepopo (on Wergo) is better than Sibylle Ehlert's (on the new Sony disc). (They're both fantastic at one of the most difficult singing pieces in the history of opera.) Other things may be better on the new version. But who wants to nit-pic? I am glad to have them both. If someone wanted to know which to buy first, though, I'd say start with the old Wergo disc while it's still available (I hope for a long time to come, but who knows?), unless the German is such an obstacle that it's better to have the English version on Sony. Either disc, though, is full of great performances of Ligeti's amazing, funny, mysterious, powerful masterpiece.

I will not bother defending Le Grande Macabre for those dismayed at how it differs from earlier Ligeti; having studied the works from 1943 on, I hear a continuity that others may miss. Know only that the opera was influenced by the visual arts of Bosch, Brueghel and Saul Steinberg, the operas of Monteverdi and Verdi, the absurdist theater of Alfred Jarry, and the films of Charlie Chaplin. In other words, be forewarned!

Having not seen the recent San Francisco production I can only imagine the wild visuals, but the performers in this spanking new edition are spot on. Ligeti has considerably abridged and tightened the opera (first written in 1974-77), and has greatly refined his original vision (the composer has even gone on record preferring the English libretto to the original German.) The Wergo original is of interest primarily to completists.

Let me just add that history is everywhere present in LGM; this is the closest Ligeti's come to a "collage" work, which seems completely appropriate given the darkly surreal subject matter. He would never produce something quite like this again, but let us hope against hope that he finishes the long running operaplanned on the Alice books. For more about Ligeti, I recommend the Richard Steinitz work and life (although the earlier bios by Griffiths, Toop and Burde are great as well).

Ligeti's opera "Le Grand Macabre" based on the ballade of Michel de Ghelderode is a great musical achievement of our time. This version by Salonen, sung in English, is a reference. Salonen is a young enthusiastic conductor who loves the score (he told once something about composing and opera, after conducting Ligeti's Grand Macabre) and it is an authentic gift hearing Philharmonia Orchestra under his rules. In the casting, this version counts with a shining and lovely Amanda (Laura Claycomb),a funny Mescalina (Jard van Ness) and a really dark (literally) Nekrotzar (Willard White). Only Gepopo (Sybille Ehlert) is not fully convincent. But it is delightful hearing her, in any case, singing "Stern measures".

I am not agree with the stern reviews of some colleagues in this page. This Opera by Ligeti is magical, funny and delicious, as "The magic flute" of Mozart, for example. The music is powerful (the entrance of Nekrotzar, Astradamors' torture...) and filled with beauty (Gepopo's "misteries").

I love this opera and those of Penderecki, and I consider them the best works in their genre of the last 50 years.

I love Ligeti's music and I never fully understood why. I don't care for most contemporary composers, but I feel that he always has something very interesting to say and it goes way beyond the cacophony normally associated with contemporary music. To be frank there's enough dissonance in this work to make most people cringe, but, again, there's something to the way he approaches music and sound that elevates his works way above the banal or ugly and irritating, like Cage and Carter. Like Penderecki, Ligeti has his own musical vocabulary and he's not afraid to either use it or add to it when necessary. The result in "Le Grand Macabre" is a surrealistic soundscape that compliments the equally surrealistic tale of an imaginary kingdom and it's odd inhabitants. Truly bizarre and, definitely, not for everyone. Nevertheless, a truly great work. As original and wonderfully bizarre as one could only hope for. The performance is wonderful and most cohesive. Not an easy thing to accomplish with a work of this magnitude and complexity.

Amazon can't seem to recommend this one enough. I wish that made me happy. As it is, I find it frustrating. Opera seems to take precedence in critical and intellectual circles as an inherently superior medium of musical expression. I find this tragic, since Opera is as much or more about theater (actors, costumes, lights, pyrotechnics, etc.) than it is about music.

Le Grande Macabre is certainly one of Ligeti's monumental works and this is very much a recording worthy of owning if contemporary opera is of interest to you. I don't feel it appropriate to comment on the performances since experience has taught me that every listener has their own agenda and each grades a performance according to those criteria. He who has ears, let him listen...

My principle reason for posting this review is to encourage passers by to examine Ligeti's instrumental works, particularly the Chamber Concerto, the fabulous Wergo release containing Lontano and other orchestral works, and the piano etudes. Le Grande Macabre is, more or less, a composite of the ideas Ligeti has explored throughout his career. But as Ligeti is obedient to the requirements of storytelling, in the opera these ideas are decoration. In his other works, they are the substance.

I'm not sure who annoys me more--people who claim to adore this opera because it's so "wacky" and "crazy," or people who dismiss it as childish and chaotic rubbish. For that matter, toss in amateurs who approach and evaluate Ligeti solely from the appallingly limited perspective of their experiences of "2001: A Space Odyssey."

1) The opera--the COMPOSITION--is not anarchic: it's beautifully written & scored, well-structured (more so in this modern edited version), and profoundly purposeful--inspired from stem to stern. It's a brilliant composer's DEPICTION of absurdity (I'd argue the definitive musical depiction), and large stretches of it often remind me of the opening storm scene from Verdi's Othello. It's also beautiful. Generic opera buffs, if they ever troubled themselves to get their snouts out of the comfortable distant past, would marvel at the endless nods to tradition present in Le Grande Macabre. Equally, noise-band fans and alternative types who claim to admire Le Grande Macabre too often just don't get far beyond the opera's surface features. They like the opera for the same dumb reasons that others dislike it.

2) It's grindingly clear from the peevish one-star reviews that the dismissive types really shouldn't be going anywhere near material like this, any more than a first-year German student should be writing critiques of Goethe, or some teen photoshop geek should be evaluating de Kooning. The Ones-Stars' reviews reveal an awful truth--that being a fan of classical music does not automatically make you intelligent or perceptive, or prove that you are any more musically sophisticated than the average five-year-old, who can clap along to Vivaldi as well as anyone else who wrongly treats that great composer as a creator of classy "Easy Listening" pieces. I've argued for years that too many consume classical music as a hoity-toity form of elevator musak; those people shouldn't write reviews, ESPECIALLY of music like this.

3) This is a great opera. I've been familiar with it for nearly twenty years now and, like any masterpiece, it gets better and MORE interesting over time. Arguing about the respective merits of the only two recordings, especially when they are two different VERSIONS, seems a little silly. I like the Wergo recording for any number of reasons: one being that since it's sung in German I can (when I want to) focus more easily on Ligeti's extraordinary music. It's also an enthusiastic performance. This Sony recording is also fine, and sung in English it makes the experience more properly theatrical. This tighter version is as appropriate for the times as the looser-limbed original version was for its less stick-up-hinder era. Buying both helps one learn more about the piece, and a lot about Ligeti, who is a composer who can be glibly dismissed or ignorantly misunderstood only at one's peril.

OK--Ligeti was a genius, and he wrote one opera and I suspect it was the only opera he felt could or should be written in an era of profound cultural decay. The opera is about us, and, in a way, it is about these reviews, and Amazon reviews as a whole, and the entire goofball mess that is our modern apocalyptic world. This is the sort of art that sane, immensely talented, profoundly gifted people are almost compelled to produce in insane times. People may ooh and coo over the comforting NPR-ish predictabilities, unchallenging music, and pseudo-profound moral non-dilemmas* of recent products by Adams, Glass, and Tan Dun, but for me, Le Grande Macabre is the mighty capstone to the great Western operatic tradition that started with Monteverdi.

*I really worry about people who think the Achille Lauro incident or Robert Oppenheimer's anxieties over an issue everyone in the audience has already made up their minds about is something up there with Chekov or Tolstoy. These composers (despite their claims) don't challenge; they meet & match audience expectations as scrupulously as some pleaser like Meyerbeer (Tan Dun is easily the new Meyerbeer). Worse, these composers turn moral issues into nebulous comfortable hash--everything reduced to a "well, I guess everybody's right and everybody's wrong, and we all have our different perspectives" sort of spineless mush.

Though I haven't heard the German-language recording (the original libretto is in German), I have to believe that, in a language in which the listener lacks fluency, the immediacy of the text's impact would be lost. That's a serious loss when one is dealing (as here) with music that exists largely to amplify a text: rather like the acting in a silent movie (or--perhaps a more appropriate comparison here--the action in a Punch-and-Judy show). This English-language recording I therefore found very welcome.

No recording of course can give one a feel for the bizarre stage sets that (I have to think) must be essential to the impact of this opera in a live performance.

Relatively new though this opera is, to me it already seems somewhat dated, heavily redolent of the early 1970s. It also reminds one of Thornton Wilder's THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, in that, after showing our Cosmic Problems, it facilely solves them by telling us (sort of) that Love Conquers All.

It IS refreshing to find such a broadly-targeted satire not unloading principally on the United States. Instead, there's a good deal of comic (and pretty funny) business about the follies of parliamentary government.

Though you can't tell from the outside, this is the 8th and final volume in Sony's Ligeti Edition. It's also the only currently available recording of the revised (1997) version of Ligeti's only opera, captured from a live performance conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Chatelet in Paris. As of March 2010, Sony has made the entire Ligeti Edition series available in an inexpensive nine-CD box set that includes these two CDs, so you should probably just buy that set instead of this one if you're interested in Ligeti's music.

Le Grand Macabre, by far the lengthiest of Ligeti's works, represented a culmination of Ligeti's work to date. After this he seemed to feel that he could not go on rewriting works like Atmosphères and Aventures, and like Beethoven, he fell relatively silent for a few years before resuming in a more neoclassical vein with the horn trio. Alas, although I enjoy experimental theater, and support efforts to extend music theater and other forms of theater beyond simulationism, I've never warmed to Meschke's libretto. Rendered in a more-or-less traditional operatic context (albeit with postmodern music), this setting of Gheldorode's ballade seems more pompous and self-indulgent than surreal or profound. Perhaps this text just isn't the caliber of Beckett, Jarry or Robert Wilson. Or perhaps a less ostentatious theatrical context would better suit the work. But I think that deploying the accoutrements of traditional Western opera to construct a satire of that tradition is probably a losing proposition overall: it's just too "easy" to poke fun of a genre that requires so much suspension of disbelief. The most successful avant garde operas tend to either stay outside the capabilities of conventional opera companies (Einstein on the Beach, for example, uses neither a traditional orchestra nor bel canto singers), or else look to extend the artform musically and dramatically rather than looking backwards (Taverner, Ulisse, Die Soldaten, etc.).

Ligeti always seemed better suited for nonsensical or abstract texts than he did with concrete texts. The vernacular often took him toward a literalism that undermines the depth of his highly cultivated musical language. Contrast the overly particularlized text painting and straightforward puns of Le Grand Macabre to Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures, especially in a good staging that brings out the humor. Or consider how powerful and radical Ligeti's Requiem, with its jaded Latin text, still sounds 40 years later (Stanley Kubrick or no). But then -- and this is a big caveat -- I've never seen a live staging of this opera. And as of December 2009, I've only heard of a single North American production (San Francisco, 2004) -- sadly, opera companies this side of the Atlantic are very conservative, since they rely on local patronage from corporations and wealthy individuals, and get little public support. So there's a good chance that I'm missing something that would be evident when the work is entrusted to a skilled director. Several European productions have been very well received, so I reserve the right to change my mind.

Whatever misgivings I have about the libretto don't extend to the music, which is marvelous. Much of it sounds like Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures, but in English and with a full orchestral accompaniment. A few passages are closer to the Ligeti of Atmosphères and Volumina. Many passages anticipate the neoclassical orientation of late period Ligeti. The music of the lover couple (whose characters were named Spermando and Clitoria in the original, but now bear expurgated monikers) is often reminiscent of Clocks and Clouds, sometimes with undulating chromatic lines in the strings and woodwinds outlining chromatic scales in an example of classic Ligeti micropolyphony. Other passages represent a departure, and presage the more pitch-oriented works of Ligeti's late period. And there's a good dose of postmodern pastiche, such as the passage starting at 1:16 of Track 6 in the opera's first scene, which I read as a quotation of common modernist licks. The second scene is of a style associated with post-War composers like Tippett and Birtwhistle. And the work ends with a diatonic passacaglia of tenuous tonality. Nekrotzar's Entrance in the third scene may be the most famous excerpt, a passacaglia over a crazy distortion of the theme from the finale of Beethoven's Eroica symphony. There are other allusions to specific pieces, such as Offenbach's Can Can in Scene 2. And of course there are plenty of parodies of operatic conventions, such as the male lover being sung by a female singer in a satire of the trouser role tradition, or the moralizing ensemble ending recalling operas like Don Giovanni (or The Rake's Progress). What remains constant is Ligeti's mastery at eliciting an almost unbroken succession of unexpected colors from the voices and instruments.

A full libretto is supplied. The recording makes a nice contrast with the original German version of Le Grand Macabre, which you might be able to track down from the Wergo recording, either complete or condensed into a concise and very enjoyable format (as there was originally much more spoken dialog than the 1997 version). And of course this recording is in English, which Ligeti now prefers over the German or Swedish of the original. The play by Michel de Ghelderode is in French, so Ligeti and Meschke retained the language of the title.

I listened to this recording in my school's listening lab. I found it to be a compelling and riveting example of how exciting modern opera can be. Ligeti, though scorned by some for the raw carnality opera, is only playing his part in the musical evolution that comes from our era. As interpreters, I think the cast (esp. Laura Claycomb, alumna of SMU) is amazing!! They rose to the occasion and recorded a fantastic work. Thanks for making this recording and doing your part as singers of the present, going beyond the mindset of the ultra-conservative traditionalist. What a great testament to musicianship!

I'm a little late to the discussion on this opera, and I've read the other reviews with interest. Not everyone is a fan of Ligeti, although he offers something to everyone somewhere in his oevre. I myself am very much a fan, both of his technique and his relentless sense of exploration.

What doesn't come up much in the other reviews is just how funny this opera is. It's a dark, dark comedy--some people just don't get dark comedy--but a comedy it is. The language, in translation, is often coarse and rough-hewn, but it's an accurately sharpened version of the way a lot of people speak. The music is in places slapstick but in other places is truly sublime. It has been pointed out that there's not much respect for authority figures in this opera. That's OK with me.

Ligeti spent a lot of time reworking this piece, removing impracticalities in performance and instrumentation. He ended up with a cohesive, hilarious whole. There are some real challenges for the singers, but I don't hear a weak voice in the entire performance. I find it quite listenable on its own. Readers on the the East coast will have an opportunity to see the Met perform this in the 2009-2010 season. I'm jealous.

I should also point out that Ligeti extracted a short suite from this opera that's available here as well as on a couple of other CDs. The suite itself is available in two forms--one with trumpet and one with soprano. The suite got me interested in the opera and it may serve as a stepping stone for others.