‘I am in a prison’, György Ligeti once wrote. ‘One wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.’

The third event in this new series at Kings Place celebrates one of the 20th century’s most progressive minds. Ligeti found his escape plan – his turning point – in a more spontaneous approach to composition, using free-form drawings to express shape, colour and contour before committing a single note to the page. From the compelling absurdity of Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes to the glittering colours of his Melodien, we explore Ligeti’s radical, time-bending compositional methods.