Search - Asko Ensemble;Schoenberg Ensemble;Nott :: The Ligeti Project

Definitive Ligeti

Christopher Culver | 12/08/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"THE LIGETI PROJECT is the second of two efforts -- the first being Sony's "Gyorgy Ligeti Edition" -- to offer Gyorgy Ligeti's complete works in performances approved by the composer himself. While Sony's series mainly recorded Ligeti's chamber output, this successor series on Warner Classics was able to record his orchestral works. THE LIGETI PROJECT originally encompassed five full-priced discs released between 2001 and 2004. Happily, Warner Classics later packaged all these together in this box set, and you can enjoy many of Ligeti's key pieces at an economical price. The performers here are top-class and Ligeti's own hand-picked, with among others pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard continuing on from the Sony series, the Schoenberg Ensemble cond. Reinbert de Leeuw on the pieces for smaller forces, and the Berlin Philharmonic cond. Jonathan Nott on the large-scale works.



Excepting some early pieces written before the composer escaped from Communist Hungary, Ligeti's music generally falls into two periods. The first lasted from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s and is the era of "micropolyphony", an orchestral texture so dense that individual lines can scarcely be made out. From this period we have "Apparitions", "Atmospheres", "Adventures/Nouvelles Adventures", the Requiem, "Lontano", the Chamber, Cello and Double Concertos, "Ramifications", "Melodien", "Clocks and Clouds" and "San Francisco Polyphony". This is the spooky music featured in Kubrick's film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.



Ligeti's second stylistic period came after a long hiatus at the end of the 1970s. Now he was mainly concerned with rhythm, including the remarkable music of the African Pygmies and of jazz innovators and with the unusual tunings one finds in Eastern European folk music, ocarinas and mountain horns. To this era belong the Piano and Violin Concertos, "Sippal, dobbal, nadihegeduvel" for soprano and percussion and -- what was sadly to be Ligeti's last work and possibly left uncompleted -- the Hamburg Concerto for horn.



The project has several works which don't fit neatly into these two eras and, to be honest, are basically filler, at least for me. These are the early "Concert Romanesc", a transcription of "Musica Ricercata" for bayan, and a godawful arrangement of old-timey ballroom dances. Ligeti's tape piece "Artikulations" is present here, in a stereo mixdown from four-channel, which is sometimes fun. He supressed its successor experiment "Glissandi" as juvenalia, though it was once released on a Wergo record. These were originally released on the fifth and last disc of the series, which I detested, but in this box set you're still getting the good stuff for less dough, so I can't complain as much and I can't rate the box as a whole less than five stars.



Ligeti's music seems to have had a much wider appeal than other contemporary composers. He was an avant-garde figure, but one keen to write music that is intriguing to the ear instead of merely interesting in paper, and there's a great deal of humour in his work. If you are new to Ligeti, I'd suggest saving THE LIGETI PROJECT for a bit later, after you've succeeded in acquiring the eight volumes of Sony's Gyorgy Ligeti Edition; sadly, Sony has allowed those recordings to fall out of print just like everything on the label that isn't crossover claptrap, so you need to move on those right away. Still, this here is half of Ligeti's amazing body of work, and you should hear it sooner or later."

The foundation of a complete Ligeti library

Michael Schell | www.schellsburg.com | 12/07/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Like Beethoven and Stravinsky, Ligeti's output divides rather neatly into three distinct style periods. First are the early works from Ligeti's pre-flight years. These are a combination of juvenilia, Eastern European folklorist works, pieces inhabiting a Bartókian sound world, and the occasional bit of internationalist or modernist experimentation that hints at what was to come. Most of these works are of minor importance beyond the world of Ligeti immersion. But a handful, such as the First String Quartet, and a few of the movements from Musica Ricercata, are worthy of his more mature works.



The heart of Ligeti's output, and the basis for the consensus that places him among postmodernism's greatest composers, is the series of masterworks written during his middle period which lasted from roughly 1957 (after his escape from Hungary) to 1977 (marked by the completion of his opera Le Grand Macabre). The "sound surface" compositions from the period, including Atmosphères, the Requiem, Lux Aeterna and much of the Second String Quartet, fall into a genre of acoustic music that was not unique to Ligeti -- it's also associated with Penderecki and Xenakis, and more peripherally with composers like Lutoslawski -- but Ligeti was arguably the greatest of the lot. Central to this musical language is the elevation of timbre as the most important musical parameter, supplanting the traditional pitch-priority that had been dominant in Western art music since its inception. Ligeti's vocabulary in these works consists largely of tone clusters, either in sustained notes, or as the unfolding of many rapidly moving chromatically undulating lines, in both cases creating a composite texture where the primary impression is of the resulting tone color, rather than the melodic or harmonic implications of any individual instrumental line. It was this music that was brought to wider attention through its use to accompany the monolith and stargate sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey, leading many to think of it as "space music".



Other works from this period follow a model developed in Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, which are closer to the serial pointillist style of many post-WW2 composers, but with an emphasis on color and rhythmic gestures in a way characteristic of Ligeti (and more musically interesting than many of the more formulaic works of Ligeti's colleagues). A third kind of work from this period explores polymeters and rhythmic phase patterns. In the former category falls the third movements from the both the Chamber Concerto and Second String Quartet. In the latter category would be Continuum and the Three Pieces for Two Pianos.



Le Grand Macabre, by far the lengthiest of Ligeti's works, represented a culmination of his middle period work, and additionally introduced an element of postmodern pastiche. After this, Ligeti seemed to feel that he had reached a dead end. Not wanting to go on rewriting works like Atmosphères and Aventures over and over, Ligeti, like Beethoven, fell relatively silent for a few years. Then, in 1982, the horn trio, followed by the first of the piano etudes, launched a third style period. These late works represent somewhat of a conservative retrenchment from Ligeti's more experimental middle period works, in rather the same way that Stravinsky's neoclassical period represented a step back from the experimentation of his youth. Many of Ligeti's late works, including the horn trio, are unabashedly neoclassical, and return to an emphasis on pitch-priority and musical gestures. Still Ligeti resisted the most hackneyed temptations to which some of his colleagues succumbed (e.g., Penderecki's and Rochberg's forgettable attempts to time travel back to the 19th Century).



Several of these late works have found considerable favor with performers, as they are generally (but not always!) easier to perform, eschew the extended playing techniques of Ligeti's earlier works, and are less challenging for casual listeners. But I'm confident that Ligeti's historical legacy will ultimately depend on posterity's judgment of his middle period works, rather than the more conventional compositions written between 1982 and the end of his career in roughly 2001.



Teldec's Ligeti Project comprises five CDs that focus mainly on the large ensemble works that Sony apparently didn't have the money to record in their Ligeti Edition CDs (though Sony did manage to release Le Grand Macabre which is probably the most expensive of all to put on). Taken together, as other reviewers have pointed out, these five Teldec albums and the eight Sony albums give you almost the entire Ligeti oeuvre. Some piano music is missing: three of the four Piano Etudes from Book 3, the Three Bagatelles written for David Tudor in 1961, and a work of juvenilia called Chromatic Fantasy that Ligeti withdrew. Also missing is the string orchestra version of Ramifications (though you do get the version for 12 solo strings in LP4), and the tape piece Glissandi from 1957 (which may have been withdrawn by the composer, but is still available on an old Wergo recording). A third sort tape piece, simply called Pièce Électronique No. 3, was sketched in 1958, but not realized until a 1996 residency in the Netherlands. Also nice to have is the original German version of Le Grand Macabre, which you might be able to track down from another Wergo recording. A single-LP edition from Wergo condensed the opera to half its length, a concise and very enjoyable version, but one not currently available on CD as far as I can tell.



But back to Teldec's contribution: with this five-CD boxed set, you get all the liner notes from the five standalone Ligeti Project CDs, but not the accompanying photos and score excerpts. The latter in particular is a shame, since examining a Ligeti score can be highly illuminating. Unlike Penderecki, Cage and Stockhausen, Ligeti always used conventional musical notation and often notated music in 4/4 time even when no pulse was supposed to be heard. One such example is the excerpt from the Kyrie of the Requiem (supplied in LP4 but missing from this set). In addition to being in 4/4, it clearly shows the division of the chorus into five sections (rather than the customary four) with each one representing a fugal voice that is in turn comprised of a kind of four-part canon in augmentation where the clusters fan out from a single unison starting pitch. Nevertheless, purchasing the box set has its advantages: you'll take up about one-third the space on your CD shelf, and you'll probably get a nice discount over buying all five albums individually (though some will suggest, not unreasonably, that the fifth CD is largely redundant).



I don't regret my purchase, and I even had two of the standalone CDs in my collection already (I gave them to my sister-in-law). If you're interested enough in Ligeti to have read through this review to the end, and you can afford this set, then I think you too will not regret indulging in it, and enjoying a few hours of the finest of Ligeti. Scoop up the Sony disks too while you can, and maybe add one of the CD sets of Ligeti's complete piano music to pick up the missing keyboard works, giving you a more-or-less complete collection.



If dollars are a little scarce, or you're not a convinced Ligeti fan/completist, you might consider getting only LP2, LP4 and LE1. Add either LP5 or LE4 for Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, and perhaps LE6 for the harpsichord, organ and piano duo pieces, and you'll have most of the essential works in a few CDs. Or indulge in the four-CD Deutsche Grammophon set, and you'll accomplish much the same thing for roughly the same price. The DG disks have the advantage that every track is an important piece of music (no early period fluff to contend with), but this does make it harder to add in the missing pieces later if you want to fill out your collection. Either way, sit back with open ears and mind, some good headphones and a quiet place -- and scores if you can find them at your local library -- and transport yourself back to the heady days of the 1960s or 1970s, and imagine (or relive) being blown away by these sounds when hearing them for the first time."