György Ligeti: Volumina (Nicholas Papadimitriou, Sauer Organ, Orgelpark)

György Ligeti (1923-2006), Volumina (1961/62, 1966)

Live performance by Nicholas Papadimitriou on the Sauer Organ in the 'Orgelpark', Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Part of the "Orgelsolo's uit alle landen" Concert, November 28th, 2014.

Audio recording: Orgelpark
Assistant: André Ferreira

For more information about upcoming concerts and more, visit:
www.nicholaspapadimitriou.com

Some Background information about G.Ligeti as well as Volumina:

"György Ligeti began teaching regularly in Stockholm in 1961, and it was for the Swedish organist Karl-Erik Welin that he wrote Volumina for organ solo at the instigation of Hans Otte. Volumina came hard on the heels of Ligeti's first altogether successful foray into composing with masses of sound, Atmosphères for orchestra (1961). Ligeti's technique of composing with what he called "moveable clusters" began with Víziók, started in Budapest in 1956 before the composer fled Hungary. After arriving in Cologne (where for a time he stayed with Stockhausen), Ligeti became exposed to the new musical thinking of Stockhausen and Boulez, and started working in the electronic music studio. Ligeti's idea of composing by building up many levels of sound began to take shape. He used the technique in parts of Apparitions (1958-59) before applying it wholeheartedly in Atmosphères. The dense layers of sound in that piece are made up of many individual parts; one section is a forty-eight voice mirror canon, with each string player playing a similar but rhythmically variant version of a short melodic motif. For the single organist (with assistants to work the stops) in Volumina, of course, that approach was impossible. Ligeti instead thought of the moving clusters as blocks of sound. He indicated general pitch areas and durations by using thick black lines; a wavy line or "squiggle" might mean a brief flurry of individual notes. Volumina begins with all the stops pulled out and every key of one manual depressed, and this combination made the motor of the Göteborg organ catch fire during a practice run. The church council at Bremen, where the premiere was scheduled to take place, cancelled the live performance when they heard about the fire in the Göteborg organ. The premiere of Volumina took place in May 1962 at the Bremen Cathedral via a tape recording of Karl-Erik Welin's performance of the piece at Göteborg. Welin later premiered the revised version of Volumina in Kiel in May 1968. Volumina is about fifteen minutes in length."
~ Robert Kirzinger, Rovi