This (Volume 6) is the latest CD in Sony Classical’s complete Ligeti Edition and complements the Etudes for piano and Musica ricercata which came out earlier this year as Vol. 3 (1/97). It presents Ligeti’s remaining music for piano, including works for two and four hands from his student days, the substantial Three Pieces for two pianos of 1976, and all of his music for harpsichord and organ. It’s not such an essential disc as Vol. 3 and may at first glance look like odds and ends, but if you already have an interest in Ligeti it will, I think, be an irresistible entertainment (no, not all at once!). And no one on the outside looking in should feel in need of a special key. Ligeti is modern music’s master of wit and magic; do not hesitate to approach.
This complete edition is now making it more and more apparent that he was melting down exterior impulses into his own interior images and ideas well before he left Hungary in 1956. The five compositions for piano duet – the first five items listed in the title above – are all prehistoric Ligeti (to use his terms), but even in the March and the Polyphonic etude, written in 1942 and 1943 when he was still a student in Kolozsvar, it’s possible to discern in the youth the father of the man – the Etude gets a well-placed kick downstairs that not every young composer of that time would have directed to it. The Three Wedding Dances of 1950 are Bartokian without being a pale imitation – they are a reminder that Ligeti found his own way to Central European folk music and that it has remained important to him. But of these first five items, which have never been recorded before, the Sonatina is the most characteristic. It dates from 1950 and the first movement is close to one of the Bagatelles for wind quintet – which are repertoire pieces for wind groups these days.
The performances throughout the disc are impeccable and well recorded. It’s particularly good to have fresh versions of the harpsichord pieces (of Continuum especially, with its stroboscopic OpArt effects). They have been in and out of the catalogue for some time and one long overdue a bench-mark presentation of the three together. So have the organ pieces (though the little Frescobaldi Omaggio of 1951 has recently been recorded by John Scott, Priory, 8/96); Zsigmond Szathmary, one of Ligeti’s preferred interpreters, has been associated with them for many years, and with Ligeti himself as one of the registrants of Volumina he makes a splendid case for this and the Two Studies (“Harmonies” and “Coulee”) as serious stuff. Volumina in particular has often been regarded as a bit of a jape, and (I suspect) by the organ fraternity as mad, bad and dangerous to know, if not an affront to the instrument. The notes in the booklet are by Ligeti himself; his account of the preparation for its premiere in 1962 – which Goteborg Cathedral never got over – mark him out as a gifted comic writer (“when the motor was turned on, smoke poured from the vicinity of the pipes, followed by a horrid stench of burning rubber from the insulating layer of the electrical wires. It was later found that all the mechanical parts made of soft metal had melted. The insurance company refused to pay up because the investigation revealed that at some point someone had used a bent sewing needle in place of a normal fuse... ”).
Best of all are the Three Pieces for two pianos. They were recorded in 1979 for DG by Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky (9/80 – nla), the dedicatees, but since then have not been available except on Wergo in Bavarian Radio recordings (3/89). Established two-piano partnerships don’t go near them; and yet they are brilliantly imagined for the medium. The first, the statuesque “Monument”, acquires a three-dimensional impression through the precise differentiation of dynamic levels which characterize its various musical layers; the third is a sort of ‘liquidized’ version of the first with one of Ligeti’s most memorable chorale-like codas; and the second, the longest, derived its inspiration from Ligeti’s observation that his brand of illusionism and liking for irregular rhythmic structures had something in common with what Terry Riley and Steve Reich had been doing – “Chopin too is of the party” (the finale of the ‘Funeral March’ Sonata).
I think I had better stop and leave you, if you will, to be intrigued. This is an excellent continuation of the Sony series.'