Patterns in Time: Ligeti & Illean

How many colours can sound contain? Four composers paint with an iridescent ensemble palette in this London Sinfonietta concert.

Melodien was an important transitional work for György Ligeti. It fuses two key parts of his 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 Gérard Grisey, a composer in thrall to sound’s acoustic properties. His spectral soundworld is steeped in beauty and a strange, enthralling sensuality. Talea, meaning ‘cutting’ in Latin, contorts a single manic rhythm into strikingly varied shapes.

Then, two contemporary composers find new ways to hypnotise. Lisa Illean’s new work, a London Sinfonietta commission receiving its world premiere, pays close attention to sonorities and subtly unfolding harmonic forms, creating a sonic space you can bathe in. Laure M. Hiendl’s Chronochromatic Variations project, meanwhile, makes an “animated still life” out of sampled, looped shards from the English pastoral tradition.

Join us to hear the London Sinfonietta and conductor Jack Sheen explore how four composers turn pattern into sound.