Ligeti Project 3

The works on this album were written between 1935 and 2019 by four Hungarian composers: Béla Bartók, who was the teacher of Sándor Veress, who taught György Ligeti, who in turn was an early but formative influence on Péter Eötvös. Their compositions all share the idea of a dialogue between cultured and popular elements, between a Western music tradition and folk music, particularly of Eastern Europe. This idea was formulated in the early 20th century by Bartók himself, who considered the use of folk elements in a piece of art music not only as a tool to revitalize the Classical tradition but also as a mean to unite different cultures.

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, Surrealism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd. An eccentric, Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds"), preferring this designation to that of "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.

For Cantante e tranquillo Keller Quartett leader András Keller and producer Manfred Eicher developed a carefully balanced program based entirely upon slow movements. “Together we began reviewing the recordings we had made over the last twenty years,” says Eicher, “juxtaposing works of different historical eras, uncovering correspondences between composers of the past and the present.” As a contextual frame for the project it was decided to record the slow movements of Beethoven’s Op.130 and 135, add new recordings of Kurtág, and integrate older and newer interpretations of Knaifel, Ligeti and Bach into the album.