György Ligeti Atmosphères
European Union Youth Orchestra
Conductor Vasily Petrenko
Recorded remotely during the Summer 2020 Digital Residency of the EUYO

THE STORY:
The myth of the Tower of Babel - the Biblical story in which humanity dares to try to build as high as heaven, and failing, in the process simply fragments into multiple incomprehensible languages - becomes the pivotal centre of the visual and musical tension: wandering through architect Gottfried Semper’s Piranesi-like spaces of the Museum’s grand entrance and staircases, the dense fabric of sound shifts through succeeding soundscapes as we move past Antonio Canova’s imposing sculpture Theseus Slaying a Centaur, past fleeting views of the arch spandrel paintings by Gustav Klimt, Ernst Klimt and Franz Matsch, the lunette pictures by Hans Makart and then the great ceiling painting by Mihály Munkácsy, all of these as a prelude to the camera focusing us onto three of Bruegel’s most celebrated canvases: The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, Children's Games and finally, The Tower of Babel.

The progress of Ligeti’s music as it transitions into new and bewildering tone colours around two thirds of the way through the score (at a point that could almost be described as its ‘Golden Interval’) is marked in the film by a visual shock: images from the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s astonishing exhibition of works by photographer Helmut Wimmer, The Last Day. Nature bursts through the museum’s halls, mirroring Ligeti’s deconstructive sounds and Bruegel’s fractured images in a disorientating sequence that brings us back – as if the Tower of Babel were actually an M.C. Escher-like staircase that returns unnoticed back on itself – to the opening shot of the Museum’s entrance.
We have arrived back where we began. Or have we? Echoes of the chaos caused by the Coronavirus pandemic are reflected in an almost post-apocalyptic scenario in which any sense of plan or human control has finally been shattered by the power of nature and the force of the elements. It is as if Ligeti, Bruegel, Wimmer, the pandemic and nature may be speaking in apparently different Babel-like languages, but in fact all saying the same thing: ‘The Tower of Babel already exists. Had you not noticed?

György Ligeti Atmosphères
Licensed courtesy of Plug-In Music S.r.l