Lontano

Program notes

About the Work

Lontano (the title is Italian for ‘far away’ or ‘distant’) is one of Ligeti’s most beautiful and mysterious orchestral works, composed in 1967. It is a supreme example of his ‘micropolyphony’: a technique in which the orchestra is divided into a great many individual parts, each playing slightly different lines that weave together into a dense, slowly evolving web of sound. The individual threads are inaudible as such; what we hear instead is a shimmering, continuously transforming cloud of harmony, in which colours and chords seem to crystallise out of the texture and then dissolve again, as if glimpsed from a great distance.

Unlike some of Ligeti’s more famously dissonant cluster pieces, Lontano is often surprisingly consonant and even diatonic, which gives it a strange, glowing beauty, at times almost like distant, half-remembered tonal music heard through fog. The effect is hypnotic and spatial: sounds emerge imperceptibly, swell, and recede, with no melody, beat or conventional development to hold onto, only the slow breathing of the orchestral mass. At around eleven minutes it is a short but utterly immersive experience, and a perfect bridge between Bowler’s intimate new work and the cosmic grandeur of Strauss.

What to Listen For

Let go of any expectation of tune, rhythm or development: Lontano is about pure sound, colour and slow transformation. Listen for the way the music emerges almost imperceptibly from near-silence, and for the sensation of a vast, shimmering cloud of sound that is constantly, gradually changing without ever seeming to ‘move’ in the ordinary sense.

Listen especially for the moments of harmonic crystallisation, passages where, out of the dense woven texture, a recognisable chord or glowing consonance seems to form, hover, and then blur away again, like a shape coming into and out of focus in mist. Notice the extraordinary control of dynamics and orchestral colour: the music swells and fades in long, breathing arcs, with sudden surprising depths and heights. The title’s promise of distance is everything here: the sense of sound coming from far away, of vast space and slow time. It is music to be bathed in rather than followed, and a mesmerising experience in the concert hall.