Kośmieja / Ligeti / What Does Africa Have to Say About It? - NOSPR

Debussy’s piano music might never have come into being without the Javanese gamelan, Steve Reich’s minimalism would not sound the same without the art of West African drumming, Stockhausen’s Jahreszeit owes much to the Japanese gagaku chamber music, just as Ligeti’s virtuoso Études draw life from the music of Central Africa. To claim that Western modernism is nothing but a giant act of cultural appropriation would, of course, be an absurd exaggeration. And yet… there is something to the idea. When we think about the fascinating potential of what cultural exchange brings to our music, we seldom stop to ask what the other side thinks – and what it might wish to tell us in return.

This is precisely why Adam Kośmieja, in what is perhaps the first such undertaking by a Polish pianist, has chosen to juxtapose Ligeti’s dazzlingly virtuoso – not merely polyrhythmic, but hyperrhythmic – piano works with compositions created at roughly the same time by Joshua Uzoigwe, arguably Nigeria’s most distinguished contemporary composer. Coming from the Igbo people, Uzoigwe sought to accomplish what many composers from West and Southern Africa, entangled as they are in the musical tradition of their recent colonisers, have attempted. Namely, he set out to translate into the language of the piano – that most versatile, if not ‘universal’ instrument – not only the melodies and rhythms of his culture, but also its spirit and body, rendered through the sonorities and textures of local instruments, in particular the ancestors of the modern xylophone and marimba. The result may lack the sheer virtuosity and intimidating complexity of Ligeti’s oeuvre, yet it is undoubtedly musical, fresh, and perhaps far more organic.

Michał Mendyk

Concert duration: approximately 50 minutes