On the centenary of György Ligeti’s birth, a
special recording was made by the Miklós
Lukács Cimbiosis Trio, balancing between jazz,
contemporary music and improvisation, and the
Ligeti Ensemble, specializing in contemporary
music. They give their answers to the questions
raised in Ligeti’s Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet.
Rather than a transcription, we witness a
dialogue in the form of preludes and postludes,
the musical elaboration of different moods and
colours, and even the occasional dimensionchanging
power of the two bands playing
simultaneously.
On this album, artists who know no boundaries
take Ligeti’s legacy into their own hands and
continue to shape it: two ensembles prove that the
Hungarian composer’s inspirational power is still
present in contemporary jazz. The musicians of
the Ligeti Ensemble, founded by András Keller and
Zoltán Rácz, and operating under the auspices of
Concerto Budapest, play the challenging Ten pieces
for wind quintet, which is answered by the Miklós
Lukács Cimbiosis Trio, blurring the thin line between
contemporary music and jazz. The Cimbiosis Trio
did not rewrite Ligeti’s work, but instead sought
ways to engage in a dialogue with the music, by
the means of preludes and postludes, musical
elaboration of different moods and colours, and in
the 7th movement, the dimension-changing power
of simultaneous playing with the wind quintet. The
collaboration was conceived by Miklós Lukács at
the commission of BMC, and after the two bands
presented the material at the Ligeti 100 Festival in
May 2023, they carried on the project to the studio –
the result is now available to the public.
Miklós Lukács is one of the most employed artists
of BMC Records, presenting a unique fusion of jazz,
contemporary classical music, improvisation, and
folk music. With his Cimbiosis Trio, he has already
been moving more and more decisively from jazz
and folk to contemporary music. Csaba Klenyán,
solo clarinetist of Concerto Budapest, has also been
associated with BMC since the beginning of his
career, recording two albums as a member of the
Lignum Trio, and frequently performing on albums
by Hungarian composers, including Péter Eötvös,
László Sáry, and László Tihanyi. Due to their keen
interest in contemporary music, Miklós Lukács
and Csaba Klenyán have been playing together in
various projects for decades, and these experiences
have now led them to take on the task of shedding
new light on Ligeti’s piece for each other and the
audience.