So DG is the first record company to honour/cash in on the death of Ligeti in June. Actually I hope they do cash in, because anyone still wondering what all the fuss is about could do no better than start here. The chronological ordering of each disc reveals not differing preoccupations but growing mastery in realising their potential: from the internalised dialogue of the Cello Sonata (1948-53) to the self-defining, dramatic genius of the Second Quartet (1968); from everyone’s big discovery of the Ligeti Sound in Atmosphères (1961) to its self-assured apex in Melodien (1971).

Most of the DG recordings were made in the 1980s and early 1990s, and represent a Second Wave of Ligeti recordings. They lack on one hand the buzz (acoustic and musical) of Wergo’s pioneering work, and on the other the composer’s imprimatur on the complete edition shared between Sony and Warner. Clear or cloudy? Definitely clear. What else would you expect with Pierre Boulez in charge? He leaves extroversion to the singers in Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures, but I hear more of the notes than on any of the other four versions I know. Ligeti didn’t shun old-fashioned virtuosity, he revelled in it, and so do Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Saschko Gawriloff in the late concertos for piano and violin. However, my own picks from this set date from when the music was wet on the page. The LaSalle Quartet don’t treat the Second Quartet as a monolith of 20th-century quartet-writing; listening to them there is no sense of the compilation aesthetic that others have found in the piece. The frankly scary sounds that Gerd Zacher gets from an organ in Volumina surpass even his own Vox recording from the same period (1968). And the Kontarsky piano duo are irresistible in the Three Pieces, the triptych Ligeti wrote with them in mind. The second panel is a “Self portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin’s there somewhere)”. Hardly since Beethoven has music been able to laugh at itself and be worthy of the joke. I’d like to think that the three of them are now enjoying it together.