In the year of his centenary and with its own half-century fast approaching, it made sense for Ensemble Intercontemporain to revisit the music of Ligeti, with which it has been associated from its earliest days, in the company of recently appointed music director Pierre Bleuse.

Ligeti’s two later concertos are now firmly established in their respective repertoires. Hae-Sun Kang’s take on the Violin Concerto is distinct from the bracing asperity of dedicatee Saschko Gawriloff or the emotional self-containment of Jeanne-Marie Conquer on those previous EIC recordings – notably her intensely eloquent ‘Aria, Hoquetus, Chorale’ and suffused fervency in its ‘Passacaglia’, even if Philippe Manoury’s cadenza for the final ‘Appassionato’ feels too methodical to be an ideally cumulative culmination. Nor is Dimitri Vassilakis found wanting next to Pierre-Laurent Aimard or Hidéki Nagano in the Piano Concerto, its outer movements here as capricious as the Lento e deserto feels plangent in its remoteness but, and hardly for the first time, the following two movements rather cancel each other out in the overall formal scheme. In between, the Cello Concerto embodies its composer’s earlier preoccupation with textural and dynamic extremes, Renaud Déjardin projecting the relative stasis and animation of its two movements with even more immediacy than Jean-Guihen Queyras or Pierre Strauch.

Bleuse draws playing of greater spontaneity if only slightly less precision than Pierre Boulez in that previous EIC recording of the Chamber Concerto then, in the Solo Viola Sonata, John Stulz steers a secure course between the fine-honed rhetoric of dedicatee Tabea Zimmermann and the coursing astringency of Nurit Stark in her Gramophone Award-winner (BIS, 10/22). Messrs Vervoitte, Tosi and Vichard are highly perceptive in the Horn Trio that marked a turning point in Ligeti’s output, its confrontational engagement with the Western tradition uppermost in the fractured discourse of its opening Andante or heightened anguish of its concluding Lamento. Lighter fare comes from Dimitri Vassilakis in the playful intricacy of the Capriccios and, with Sébastian Vichard, pert economy of piano-duet miniatures where Bartók is an overt influence.

With its analytical yet never antiseptic sound, courtesy of the Philharmonie de Paris, and detailed notes by the redoubtable Philippe Albèra as well as pertinent introductory thoughts by Bleuse, this is a persuasive means for getting to know a representative cross-section of pieces by one of the most influential composers from the later 20th century and essential listening even for those who have the recordings mentioned, or favour such as Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s heady iconoclasm in the Violin Concerto (Naïve, 12/12). Its durability as music is surely beyond question.