György Ligeti – »great composer and clown of the highest calibre«. The composer became instantly famous in the new music scene with his orchestral work »Atmosphères«, which premiered in Donaueschingen in 1961. This work achieved great fame as film music, although it was not composed for this purpose: Stanley Kubrick used an excerpt from Ligeti's »Lux aeterna« for his film »2001: A Space Odyssey«. Born in Transylvania, Romania, in 1923, the composer fled to Germany after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in the autumn of 1956 and worked for a time in Cologne with Karl-Heinz Stockhausen at the Studio for Electronic Music.
In the podcast, Christoph Vratz provides an insight into Ligeti's work on the occasion of the three birthday concerts – Ligeti 100 – on 28 May. In addition to audio samples, the composer, who died in 2006, and companions such as pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard have their say.