Teldec’s continuation of the series initiated by Sony to record all Ligeti’s acknowledged works reaches its final instalment with this attractive cross-section taking in music from the composer’s Hungarian years as well as a key work from the early 1960s.

That work is Aventures et Nouvelles Aventures – what might be described as a ‘scenic fantasy’ for three singers and seven instrumentalists, where the influence of the experimental Fluxus movement is most marked. This is music whose seeming flights of inanity have been dismissed as modish and yet, technically and expressively, it draws on all aspects of Ligeti’s thinking after his arrival in the West. Moreover, the outbursts of manic dialogue and a surreal chorale passage (track 3, 0’59”) relate respectively to the Dies irae and Lacrymosa of the work’s conceptual opposite, the Requiem, that Ligeti was then composing. Reinbert de Leeuw’s live account may be less poised in the relationship of voices and instruments than Salonen’s, but it projects the music’s black humour with clarity and impact.

It makes sense to follow this with Ligeti’s only acknowledged tape composition – Artikulation (1958), where the phonetic dissection of language then being pursued in Western European electronic studios is made to yield an appealingly deft irony. A selection from Musical ricercata (1953), in Max Bonnay’s transcription for bayan accordion, is diverting though less entertaining than Pierre Charial’s adaptation for barrel-organ (Sony, 7/97). David Geringas’s account of the Cello Sonata sweeps the board in its emotional earnestness and propulsive energy – confirming the piece, along with the First Quartet, as Ligeti’s most substantial achievement prior to his arrival in the West.

The disc is completed by three ‘official’, crowd-pleasing pieces from the turn of the 1950s. Peter Masseurs fluently dispatches the perky Big Turtle Fanfare, derived from music for a Chinese puppet play, while De Leeuw and the Asko and Schönberg Ensembles bring pathos to the Orff-meets-Bartók functionality of Ballad and Dance, and an appealing freshness to the Old Hungarian Ballroom Dances. A low-key conclusion to the series, maybe, but far from irrelevant in its rounding-out of our appreciation of a seminal figure, whose profile has been much enhanced by this edition as a whole.