Ligeti dies

Jun 12, 2006 18:44

I just heard that the composer György Ligeti has died. Even those who think they've never heard his work probably have, because Kubrick nicked some of it for 2001: A Space Odyssey (Ligeti said the first he heard about this was when a friend told him he'd just seen a film that was full of his music). Twenty or thirty years ago, my mother and I became enchanted by a piece of his that we'd heard on the radio - I can't remember its name now, it was something ethereal on strings, but we did manage to track it down, though our record player wasn't really up to playing something that delicate. He wrote an opera called Le Grand Macabre, a dark comedy about Death visiting a city, which I seem to have failed miserably to see or hear. There are extracts from his music at the site linked to above, so maybe I'll be able to find that string piece again.

death, music, opera

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