Pianist and composer Brecht Valckenaers, born in the 21st century and passionate about the music of the previous century, seems to embody Festival 20·21 and Transit. For this edition, artistic director Pieter Bergé commissioned him to adapt Musica ricercata to his own style and present it to the audience in a very personal way.
1951
The career of composer Györgi Ligeti (1923 – 2006) has barely begun and he finds himself already on a dead end. He survives the labor camp, where he was forced to wear a yellow band because of his Jewish descent, but his father, brother, uncle and aunt do not return alive from Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Mauthausen.
Shortly after the Nazi regime, Hungary comes under a new oppressor, Stalinism. The 27-year-old Ligeti teaches at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, but the political climate is so repressive that he barely knows what his contemporaries Stockhausen or Boulez are doing elsewhere.
To avoid having to write music for party propaganda, he buries himself in scientific research into folk music, as Bartók and Kodály had done before. In 1956 he will choose the great exodus like 200,000 others. Hidden in a train under a pile of mailbags, he undertakes a life-threatening escape to the West that takes him to Vienna, Cologne, Darmstadt and Paris, never to return to Budapest or his birthplace in Transylvania.
Ex NihiloIn 1951 I began to experiment with very simple structures of rhythms and sonorities as if to build up a 'new music' from nothing. What can I do with a single note? With its octave? With an interval? With two intervals? With certain rhythmic relationships?
Györgi Ligeti.
Musica ricercata is an eleven-part cycle in which Ligeti searches for a new language, almost from nothing, sometimes achieving much with very little material. In part I he uses only two notes: the A on all possible places of the keyboard and at the very end twice D as a kind of solution. For part II he chooses three (other) notes, part III four notes and so on … ending with the 12 notes in part XI. As sparingly as he uses the notes, so lavishly does he play with combining the most diverse rhythms and he experiments fully with texture, dynamics and emotional expression.
In only two parts does Ligeti refer to other composers. Part IX is an in memoriam for Béla Bartók, whom he admired and from whom he tried to break free. The final part XI, which is constructed as a kind of fugue, is a homage to the Italian composer and virtuoso keyboard player Girolami Frescobaldi (1583-1643), who brought the ricercar, the predecessor of the fugue, to full bloom. Ligeti kept the score of his 'dangerous' experiment in a drawer; Musica ricercata was created in 1969 in the Swedish town of Sundsvall.
2024
Five pages of Ex Nihilo still have wet ink. A native of Leuven, born in the 21st century and passionate about the music of the previous century, pianist and composer Brecht Valckenaers seems to embody Festival 20·21 and Transit. For this edition, artistic director Pieter Bergé commissioned him to adapt Musica ricercata to his own style and present it to the audience in a very personal way.
The series of composition studies, as Ligeti called them himself, were not intended as a finished product or concert program where the parts flow logically from one another. In the performance by Brecht Valckenaers, that fragmented character disappears through the addition of both five of his own interludes and five connecting fragments by Lachenmann, Kurtag, Crumb, Cowell and Bartók. 26 minutes of etudes grow into an organic concert piece of 70 minutes. Few festivals would give such a young but promising musician so much freedom and responsibility and venture such an adventure.
CDW You are even younger than Ligeti was when he wrote his Musica ricercata, how does it feel to receive this wonderful commission?
BV "Without comparing myself to Ligeti, but as a composer I am in somewhat the same position, I am also very much searching. In my five studies I try to push my own boundaries to the extreme. Especially in the field of rhythm, which is a primary obsession of mine; in a previous life I was a drummer. I like to use different rhythms and time signatures simultaneously where the left hand really does not want to know what the right hand is doing. In my etude Distorting Time it seems as if the music completely distorts and warps time like a funhouse mirror does. Ah, sometimes the explanations and the notation are much more complicated than the resulting sound."
CDW How did you choose fitting music from five other composers?
BV "Oh, it took me many months of listening and careful consideration. Ultimately I arrived at five fragments in which a composer approaches or rediscovers the piano as an instrument very clearly ex nihilo. Henry Cowell works with clusters played with arms on the keyboard, Györgi Kurtag literally asks in his introduction (fragment from Játékok) to approach the piano unbiased like a child. And then George Crumb, that is a playground, where you can explore the possibilities of the piano in a very unconventional way, but always musical, in service of the music.
By listening to so much, I have again learned an enormous amount about 20th-century music. Actually, I am very satisfied with the natural transitions I have created. Where Ligeti's piece ends, I continue without interruption with something of my own or someone else's, the three narrative threads flow organically into each other, as if I have laid a musical puzzle that culminates in a collage concert."
CDW In 1993, a documentary filmmaker showed current film footage of Ligeti's birthplace in Romania, of which he remembered very little, but to his great surprise, the composer immediately remembered the sound of the bells. 'C' est fou! Les cloches sont encore toujours les mêmes.' In your Ex Nihilo version, quite a few bells also appear.
BV "Certainly, bells are in a sense a subtheme in the concert. They can be heard in Glockenturm from Ein Kinderspiel by Helmut Lachenmann and in the homage by Györgi Kurtag (Ligeti's bosom friend) to their shared composition teacher Sándor Veress. But the bells also ring in my latest étude and in Ligeti's homage to Bartók.
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American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick opened the door to the big, international audience for Ligeti and may rightfully be called his ambassador and great fan. In the soundtrack of A Space Odyssey (1968), he used no fewer than four fragments of Ligeti's music Requiem, Lux Aeterna, Atmosphères and Aventures without permission. Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale, part II from Musica ricercata, which Ligeti described as a 'knife in Stalin's heart', absolutely contributes to the oppressive atmosphere in the erotic thriller Eyes wide shut (1999). Whether most cinema visitors read the credits and have an interest in the composers is another question. If you ask us, the collage concert Ex Nihilo in turn becomes an absolute homage to Györgi Ligeti.
Brecht Valckenaers (°2000) Gained access to the Youth Conservatory in Antwerp at the age of 15, where he was taken under the wing by Nicolas Callot and Wietse Beels. He studied/is studying piano with, among others, Nikolaas Kende, Eliso Virsaladze and Claudio Martínez Mehner. He received/receives composition lessons from Pieter Schuermans, Boudewijn Cox and Alain Craens. In 2024-25 he is perfecting his studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Basel.
Brecht has won several first prizes in competitions such as the Steinway Piano Competition, the Cantabile Piano Competition and Le Concours de Piano Andrée Charlier. In 2023 he won second prizes at the Breughel Piano Competition and the EPTA Piano Competition, where he also received the prize for the best Belgian work with one of his compositions.
For tickets and info: https://www.festival2021.be/ or view the event in our Concert Agenda