If it's Continuum you're after, hard luck. Ligeti, perhaps tempting fate, specifies that the piece should not last longer than four minutes. On BIS Eva Nordwall dashes home in 3'29'' by dint of leaving out large numbers of notes; Antoinette Vischer, at 3'36'', plays all the notes, only to be scuppered by Wergo snipping off the first 12 bars. Vischer's is a tremendous performance, by the way, and can be heard intact on the original Wergo LP (nla); but you still have to put up with the unaccountable absence of the left-hand part for most of page 9. Nor, I'm afraid, can I wax lyrical about the performance of the Wind Quintet pieces. Intonation is dicey from the start, not all the players are up to Ligeti's more extreme demands, and there is distortion on the recording.
The rest of the programme is slightly more successful. The electronic pieces are hardly vintage Ligeti—they both end inconsequentially, for one thing—and the sound-quality is limited presumably by the fact that the tapes are now more than 30 years old; but there are some inventive, playful effects here, which anyone interested in the electronic scene will enjoy getting to know.
The organ pieces come off best of all. Of the two studies, ''Harmonies'', with its reduced wind pressure, gives the entrancing impression of playing on an orchestra of pitched jet engines, and ''Coulee'' (Flowing) is a companion to Continuum in its stroboscopic Op Art effects. Volumina is in a sense uncharacteristically crude, but Karl-Erik Welin chooses suitably apocalyptic registrations and the conclusion, with forlorn sounds evaporating as the motor is switched off, is haunting.
Not one of the more successful Wergo/Ligeti discs overall then, but worth selective investigation.'