Jonathan Nott conducts Ligeti and Strauss

‘I can’t hear music now, without seeing all my colleagues’ faces in my mind’s eye. In that sense we have an unbreakable bond’, says Jonathan Nott of his achievements in Bamberg. For his farewell after 16 years, our Principal Conductor has chosen a very special programme, which throws some interesting light on his career to date. In Richard Strauss, he’s chosen an outstanding representative of musical modernism – as well as a sonic sorcerer who remains sui generis. Another composer much played in Bamberg under Jonathan Nott was György Ligeti. His experiments with the middle range of orchestral texture led from the concentrated micropolyphony of the late 1950s to a type of polyphony which, as Ligeti put it, was ‘more transparent, more clearly delineated, finer and more crystalline.’ That development is very clear in Atmosphères, Lontano and San Francisco Polyphony, all written from the early 1960s onwards. Each of these contemporary classics is contrasted in turn with a four-part viol fantasia by Henry Purcell, dating from the 1690s. So, which music will sound more foreign to us, and which more familiar? It’s a programme, admits Jonathan Nott, which ‘says a lot about me and my life as a musician.’