Like many, I first heard György Ligeti’s music on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was a teenager, and for some years after was unable to dissociate its unearthliness from Kubrick’s ambitious vision of human evolution as a product of alien intervention. Edward Gardner’s London Philharmonic Prom marked this year’s Ligeti centenary by acknowledging 2001’s grip on our imaginations, placing his Requiem and Lux Aeterna alongside Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. It’s hard to dissociate the Strauss from some of the film’s most iconic moments, either.
Bleak and sparse despite the awesome volume of sound it can generate, the Requiem, completed in 1965, offers no comfort for the fear and violence it evokes, and hearing it complete (Kubrick only uses the Kyrie) can be unsettling. Gardner’s interpretation was a thing of extremes. The quiet, penumbral opening Introit seemed to hover on the verges of sound and silence. Later, the roaring brass of the Dies Irae pinned you to your seat. The combined forces of the London Philharmonic Choir, Royal Northern College of Music Chamber Choir, and Norway’s Edvard Grieg Kor (Gardner is also their chief conductor) sang with furious intensity. Jennifer France and Clare Presland were the hieratic soloists, their voices finely blended in the ambivalent closing Lacrimosa, its oscillating vocal lines fading away in irresolution.
God may be absent in the Requiem but his light shines with cool, distant unconcern in the unaccompanied Lux Aeterna, placed before the Strauss after the interval. Gardner conducted in a pool of light at the front of the podium while the Edvard Grieg Kor sang from the Albert Hall’s gallery, their voices drifting down through the vast space.
Strauss’s Zarathustra, meanwhile, was rich in drama and detail, the playing finely focused and sensually immediate. We can easily forget that, like 2001, it deals with human evolution. But it also has points in common with Ligeti’s Requiem, notably its comparably ambivalent ending, oscillating between keys to an irresolute silence and asking more questions than it can ever answer. Ligeti was apparently uncertain about their juxtaposition. Kubrick, you realise, knew exactly what he was doing in putting them together.
