The Salzburg Festival is dedicating a series of concerts to the great Hungarian composer György Ligeti, who would have turned 100 this year – an event.
Instrumental theatre: Hundreds of metronomes are distributed around the grand piano on the podium of the large Mozarteum hall. The doors to the stage open, three men in black, including the pianist Pierre Laurent Aimard, and two tall women in bright red, members of the Minguet Quartet, rush out and set the machines in motion. Each is set differently in tempo, they tick-tock until the respective clockwork has expired. A mechanistic-dadaistic joke with a cheeky romantic title “Poème symphonique”. But instead of machine noise, the completely non-mechanical natural association of pounding rain, of gusts that blow the action back and forth. Sudden synchronized tick that immediately diverges again, large rhythms appear and disappear, the rain slowly eases until the last, particularly slow metronome clicks back and forth, everyone stares spellbound and awaits the last beat.