String Theorist

One day in December, 2010, the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff began rehearsals with an ensemble of young musicians at Carnegie Hall. The piece was György Ligeti’s iridescent Violin Concerto, a complex score of disorienting beauty, completed in 1993, in which the soloist often plays a cadenza of his own invention. Tetzlaff frequently performs the work, and has devised a brief fantasy on the concerto’s themes; at a certain point, he echoes one of Ligeti’s wispily haunting woodwind melodies by mimicking the sound of a pan flute on his violin.