Patterns in Time: Ligeti's Melodien

How many colours can sound contain? Four composers paint with an iridescent ensemble palette in this London Sinfonietta concert. Melodien fuses two key parts of György Ligeti’s compositional world: his mechanical, clockwork textures are laid over his famous clouds of airy sound. The result is lucid and transparent: Ligeti at his most radiant. Ligeti was one great 20th century colourist; another was Gerard Grisey, a composer in thrall to sound’s acoustic properties. His spectral sound-world is steeped in beauty and a strange, enthralling sensuality. Talea , meaning ‘cutting’ in Latin, contorts a single manic rhythm into strikingly varied shapes.