Tying in with the composer’s centenary, this new double album of Ligeti’s a cappella choral music vies with the classic London Sinfonietta Voices recording for the György Ligeti Edition. Performance-wise, there is little to separate the two; but in terms of recording quality, the SWR Vokalensemble disc has less live reverberation and closer miking, meaning that details of the polyphony are clearer. During his time in Hungary, at the Budapest Franz Liszt Music Academy, Ligeti was a member of different choirs, and his ease within the choral idiom is everywhere evident.

Most of the music is from before Ligeti’s creative awakening in Cologne. Songs from Mátraszentimre sets rustic modal melodies into sophisticated counterpoint, blending familiar material with erudite craft, with lyrics mostly on folk themes (‘I’ve got three barrels of wine, all three are on tap, they’re sweet as honey’, and so on). Solitude from 1946 shows hints of the later Ligeti in pedal notes against which an octatonic melody sounds, and major and minor second intervals featuring in the alto and soprano harmonies. Its mysterious sound world recalls Bartók’s night music. The second of the Two Canons, a spoken-word declamation in nonsense verse, absurdist in tone, shows the roots of what would blossom in Aventures. The gradually accumulating counterpoint of Éjszaka (‘Night’) recalls Ockeghem, one of Ligeti’s chief inspirations, with eight parts arranged in close canon eventually snapping into unison; it is suggestive of Ligeti’s later micropolyphony.

Lux aeterna, commissioned by Clytus Gottwald’s Schola Cantorum Stuttgart, is in 16 vocal parts and is familiar to everyone from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The SWR Vokalensemble’s atmospheric performance is sensitive to the minutiae of the dynamics, and the sound is bright and weighty. Closing the album are the Three Fantasies based on Friedrich Hölderlin and the two Hungarian Études, both from Ligeti’s last creative phase. For the latter, Ligeti returned to the poet Sándor Weöres with a fractured, delirious atonal vocabulary. Again, the world is that of the rural peasantry, now vividly conjured in canons run amok, spatially separated choral units, different tempos running concurrently – the hustle and bustle of daily life.