Le Grand Macabre,
London Symphony Orchestra
Barbican, London

Gyorgy Ligeti, author of Le Grand Macabre, knew a bit about death and absurdity: a Hungarian Jew, born in 1923, he lost most of his family in concentration camps, and then endured the circus of communism before escaping in 1956. But he kept his puerile sense of humour, and filled his boots when he discovered Michel de Ghelderode’s La Balade du Grand Macabre, a 1934 fantasy in the phantasmagorical Flemish tradition of Bosch, Brueghel and Ensor.

The action unrolls in “Brueghelland”, a freaky disaster zone inhabited by a child prince, a hysterical police chief, a shambling lush called Piet the Pot, two permanently inflamed lovers and various other misfits. Death comes calling in the shape of self-important Nekrotzar, announcing the end of the world. Unluckily, he gets drunk and the apocalypse probably doesn’t happen – or perhaps it already has? The humans stagger out of the wreckage with the chirpy moral: “Fear not to die, good people all! Live merrily in cheerfulness!” Death is inevitable, hence boring and irrelevant: let’s not give it the time of day.