Déjà Reviews: these reviews were first published in February 2003 and the recordings are still available.
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
The Ligeti Project Vol 1
Melodien (1971)
Chamber Concerto (1969-70)
Piano Concerto (1985-88)
Mysteries of the Macabre (1974-77; 1991)
Performers listed after reviews
rec. 2000, Stichting Muziekcentrum van de Omroep, Hilversum, Netherlands. DDD
Teldec 8573-83953-2 [64]
The Ligeti Project Vol 2
Lontano (1967)
Atmosphères (1961)
Apparitions (1958-59)
San Francisco Polyphony (1973-74)
Romanian Concerto (1951)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Jonathan Nott
rec. 2001, Philharmonie, Berlin. DDD
Teldec 8573-88261-2 [55]
The Ligeti Project Vol 3
Cello Concerto (1966)
Clocks and Clouds (1973)
Violin Concerto (1992)
Sippal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel (2000)
Performers listed after reviews
rec. 2001, Muziekcentrum Vredenburg, Utrecht, Netherlands
Teldec 8573-87631-2 [67]
The Ligeti Project Vol 1
This is the very latest release in Teldec’s excellent, hopefully ongoing, series entitled The Ligeti Project. It follows the intelligent programming formula of the previous two, in that it couples well-known major works with premiere recordings of new or lesser-known pieces.
The biggest and most performed item on the disc is undoubtedly the Violin Concerto. This is a magnificent work, one of the most important concertos of the last decade. Some critics have found its volatile aural world to reflect Ligeti’s abiding interest in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the parallel is not a fanciful one. It is an excellent example of what has become known now as his ‘late’ style, following as it did a period of illness and compositional crisis. Like many of the older generation of avant-gardists, Ligeti rediscovered a kind of tonality and metre, albeit one which is lopsided or dislocated to disturbing (or even comic) effect. This concerto offers the listener the best illustration of this new concern for ‘wayward intonation’, where some instruments in the chamber orchestra are re-tuned to natural harmonics. Add to the mixture the evocative timbres of recorders and ocarinas (a favourite sound in later Ligeti), and the resulting ‘haze of intonation’ gives a beguiling combination of clarity and sheer weirdness – try 2’50 into the Aria second movement. The whole piece is as inventive and approachable as anything in his output, and has already been well served on disc. The marvellous, award-winning DG disc from Boulez, featuring the work’s dedicatee Sashko Gawriloff, is very fine, though the big-boned playing of Frank Peter Zimmerman brings out the Romantic overtones to even greater effect. He is superbly partnered by de Leeuw, who also seems happy to underline those parallels with the great concertos of the past. An intoxicating experience.
That Boulez DG disc also includes a marvellous performance of the Cello Concerto, a work dating from 25 years earlier and inhabiting a very different aural landscape. Here, the composer’s early fascination with shimmering ‘cloud textures’ is heard to real advantage, along with a subtle and original use of the solo instrument. This new Teldec version features the great Siegfried Palm, a close collaborator of Ligeti over the years and the artist for whom it was written. This is his third recording, and though I cannot comment on the other two, I simply cannot imagine they are any more virtuosic or imaginative than this one. Palm obviously knows the score inside out, and his fine gradations of tone colour are amazing, from the imperceptible opening unison E natural (marked, believe it or not, pppppppp), to the great closing cadenza, where the cellist is called upon to perform almost superhuman feats on the instrument. The Dutch players, under their contemporary specialist conductor, are clearly inspired by the presence of Palm (and, so we understand, the composer) to give of their very best. The result is simply as good as it gets.
The remaining items are invaluable. As in Volume 2, where I could not believe Apparitions was getting its first recording, so here we have the premiere of a work from 1973 that encapsulated his whole compositional ethos up to then, the aptly titled Clocks and Clouds . The piece is scored for 12 female voices and fairly large chamber orchestra. This allows the composer to exploit to the full his two favourite structural devices, “exactly determined (‘clocks’) versus global, statistically measurable (‘clouds’) occurrences of nature”. These are translated into poetic images and then aural sounds, an utterly hypnotic mixture of iridescent clusters and diffuse, ever-changing masses of vocal and instrumental texture. It receives here a stunning performance, all the more effective for being an amazingly accurate rendition of the composer’s wishes.
The final, and most recent, work is Sippal, dobbal…, a setting of verses by Sándor Weöres, whom Ligeti describes as “a unique virtuoso of the Hungarian language … whose countless, profound and playful short poems I have always turned to for composition”. Seven poems are set, and they form a strange mixture of nature, philosophy and childish nonsense verse. Couple this with the scoring (mezzo and four percussionists) and you have what amounts to a quirky vocal entertainment, short, sweet and diverting, in its own way just as memorable and ingenious as his large scale works. Texts and translations are included, and though the nature of two of the poems renders them untranslatable, this will not spoil your enjoyment. Performances are totally exemplary.
Production values on this third volume are again very high. The recording has stunning clarity and presence, and authoritative liner notes are once more by the composer. There is a huge range of music on offer here, and I’m certain even hardened conservatives will find something to which they can respond. Very highly recommended.
The Ligeti Project Vol 2
This release represents Volume 2 of the new Teldec Ligeti Project. It could well prove to be the most popular, containing as it does some of Ligeti’s most famous pieces, as well as a couple of important premiere recordings.
Leaving aside the Romanian Concerto (one of those premiere recordings, a product of his early post-war years in Bucharest), the disc is made up of what the composer calls his “… four western pieces for large orchestra … the works that best illustrated my quest for new, unique and extreme solutions”. It is probably best to start with the two pieces purloined by Stanley Kubrick for 2001, A Space Odyssey, as this film was largely responsible for getting Ligeti’s sound-world to a larger public. Lontano and Atmosphères are both given performances of the utmost virtuosity by the Berlin Philharmonic, and it is interesting to compare them with the only serious competition, a benchmark 1994 disc from Abbado and the VPO entitled ‘Wien Modern’, and featuring these two works along with pieces by Nono, Rihm and Boulez. Where Abbado (not unsurprisingly) goes for lean, clear textures, with individual lines clearly audible through the ‘clouds’ of sound, Jonathan Nott revels in the sheer weight of tone at his disposal, producing a sound that is truly thrilling in its sumptuousness. These works exemplify Ligeti’s move towards ‘texture’ music, where clusters of adjacent sounds are used to achieve slow, seamless change, and the massed strings of the Berlin orchestra, particularly in Atmosphères, produce the kind of preternatural glow that the composer must surely have had in his mind when conceiving the piece. Abbado is a good tonic to this performance, but there is no question as to which one I will return for an amazing aural experience, helped by a recording of spectacular dynamic range.
It is astonishing to realise that the piece that effectively launched Ligeti, Apparitions, is here receiving its first recording. The scandalous premiere took place in Cologne in 1960 under one of the composer’s early champions, Ernest Bour, who made a number of pioneering Ligeti recordings for Wergo. The piece seemed to be resigned to textbook references, so it is a cause for celebration that we are now able to judge it properly in Jonathan Nott’s superb performance. The work is in two short sections, each giving a tantalising glimpse of Ligeti’s early experiments with ‘micropolyphony’. The deep, low bass opening is full of the sort of foreboding that bears out his famous quote – “I am permanently scarred; I will be overcome by revenge fantasies to the end of my days”. This outlook was formed by his experience of two dictatorships, Hitler and Stalin, and the restless second movement, which provides an effective contrast to the uneasy stillness of the first, shows a composer struggling to make his uniquely original voice be heard.
The teeming figurations that characterise San Francisco Polyphony show us the same composer fully in command of his genius. The piece comes from nearly two decades after Apparitions but is recognisably the work of the same hand and brain. Here we get more ‘clocks’ than ‘clouds’, and the bustling nature of a large, cosmopolitan American city (the inspiration for many other composers) is evoked with this composer’s unmistakable touches. It would be interesting to know what the members of the Berlin Phil. made of the piece, for there is no doubting their commitment in what must have been less-than-familiar music to them.
The last work is hardly mentioned even in textbooks. The Romanian Concerto is a product of Ligeti’s early experiments in the transcribing of folk material from wax cylinders and sounds as if it could have been written by Bartók or Kodaly. Despite this, or maybe because of it, it is a piece of great interest, especially given the path that Ligeti eventually took. Ligeti displays his debt to Bartók even in his mature music (particularly the Piano Concerto and Etudes), and it is particularly affecting to hear the young composer thoroughly mastering his great predecessor’s mix of folk song and rhythmic vitality – the last movement’s Molto vivace could be straight out of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. This immaturity does, of course, mean it is unlikely to be heard in the concert hall, and is therefore all the more valuable on disc, especially in a performance as infectious as this. Is it possible the Berliners were revelling in being able to play some ‘straight’ music at last, I wonder?
The notes, as ever in this series, are by the composer and as authoritative as one can get. The recordings, two of which are ‘live’ (though you can hardly guess) are wonderfully detailed and vivid, real demonstration stuff. Whether you are a Ligeti fan or not, I heartily recommend this – it’s worth it for the rare items and the sonic experience alone!
The Ligeti Project Vol 3
This is the very latest release in Teldec’s excellent, hopefully ongoing, series entitled The Ligeti Project. It follows the intelligent programming formula of the previous two, in that it couples well-known major works with premiere recordings of new or lesser-known pieces.
The biggest and most performed item on the disc is undoubtedly the Violin Concerto. This is a magnificent work, one of the most important concertos of the last decade. Some critics have found its volatile aural world to reflect Ligeti’s abiding interest in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the parallel is not a fanciful one. It is an excellent example of what has become known now as his ‘late’ style, following as it did a period of illness and compositional crisis. Like many of the older generation of avant-gardists, Ligeti rediscovered a kind of tonality and metre, albeit one which is lopsided or dislocated to disturbing (or even comic) effect. This concerto offers the listener the best illustration of this new concern for ‘wayward intonation’, where some instruments in the chamber orchestra are re-tuned to natural harmonics. Add to the mixture the evocative timbres of recorders and ocarinas (a favourite sound in later Ligeti), and the resulting ‘haze of intonation’ gives a beguiling combination of clarity and sheer weirdness – try 2’50 into the Aria second movement. The whole piece is as inventive and approachable as anything in his output, and has already been well served on disc. The marvellous, award-winning DG disc from Boulez, featuring the work’s dedicatee Sashko Gawriloff, is very fine, though the big-boned playing of Frank Peter Zimmerman brings out the Romantic overtones to even greater effect. He is superbly partnered by de Leeuw, who also seems happy to underline those parallels with the great concertos of the past. An intoxicating experience.
That Boulez DG disc also includes a marvellous performance of the Cello Concerto, a work dating from 25 years earlier and inhabiting a very different aural landscape. Here, the composer’s early fascination with shimmering ‘cloud textures’ is heard to real advantage, along with a subtle and original use of the solo instrument. This new Teldec version features the great Siegfried Palm, a close collaborator of Ligeti over the years and the artist for whom it was written. This is his third recording, and though I cannot comment on the other two, I simply cannot imagine they are any more virtuosic or imaginative than this one. Palm obviously knows the score inside out, and his fine gradations of tone colour are amazing, from the imperceptible opening unison E natural (marked, believe it or not, pppppppp), to the great closing cadenza, where the cellist is called upon to perform almost superhuman feats on the instrument. The Dutch players, under their contemporary specialist conductor, are clearly inspired by the presence of Palm (and, so we understand, the composer) to give of their very best. The result is simply as good as it gets.
The remaining items are invaluable. As in Volume 2, where I could not believe Apparitions was getting its first recording, so here we have the premiere of a work from 1973 that encapsulated his whole compositional ethos up to then, the aptly titled Clocks and Clouds . The piece is scored for 12 female voices and fairly large chamber orchestra. This allows the composer to exploit to the full his two favourite structural devices, “exactly determined (‘clocks’) versus global, statistically measurable (‘clouds’) occurrences of nature”. These are translated into poetic images and then aural sounds, an utterly hypnotic mixture of iridescent clusters and diffuse, ever-changing masses of vocal and instrumental texture. It receives here a stunning performance, all the more effective for being an amazingly accurate rendition of the composer’s wishes.
The final, and most recent, work is Sippal, dobbal…, a setting of verses by Sándor Weöres, whom Ligeti describes as “a unique virtuoso of the Hungarian language … whose countless, profound and playful short poems I have always turned to for composition”. Seven poems are set, and they form a strange mixture of nature, philosophy and childish nonsense verse. Couple this with the scoring (mezzo and four percussionists) and you have what amounts to a quirky vocal entertainment, short, sweet and diverting, in its own way just as memorable and ingenious as his large scale works. Texts and translations are included, and though the nature of two of the poems renders them untranslatable, this will not spoil your enjoyment. Performances are totally exemplary.
Production values on this third volume are again very high. The recording has stunning clarity and presence, and authoritative liner notes are once more by the composer. There is a huge range of music on offer here, and I’m certain even hardened conservatives will find something to which they can respond. Very highly recommended.
Tony Haywood
Buying this recording via a link below generates revenue for MWI and helps us keep free access to the site
Performers:
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano, Piano Concerto)
Peter Masseurs (trumpet, Mysteries)
Siegfried Palm (cello, Cello Concerto)
Frank Peter Zimmerman (violin, Violin Concerto)
Katalina Karolyi (mezzo-soprano, Sippal, dobbal…)
Cappella Amsterdam (Clocks)
Amadinda Percussion Ensemble (Sippal, dobbal…)
Schoenberg Ensemble (Melodien, Chamber Concerto, Cello Concerto, Violin Concerto, Clocks)
Reinbert de Leeuw (conductor, Vol 1 and Vol 3)
Asko Ensemble (Piano Concerto, Mysteries, Cello Concerto, Violin Concerto, Clocks)
