Paul Griffiths
Ligeti Was...
CDs of Old and New Ligeti Recordings
...
Even so, the new Deutsche Grammophon
offering has plenty to recommend it,
quite apart from its historical performances.
Pierre Boulez leads the Ensemble Inter-
Contemporain in beautifully clear, colourful
and characterful performances of four
concertos (those for cello, piano and violin,
and the Chamber Concerto) as well as
Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures. One
may regret he has never recorded the bigger
works- indeed, seems never to have
performed the piece that was central to
Ligeti's success if exceptional within his
output: Atmospheres. That work is heard
here, somewhat ironically, in a recording by
the Vienna Philharmonic under Claudio
Abbado that Ligeti did not like, for reasons
that may have to do with the corporeality of
the sound. Ligeti wanted a continuum,
which he felt Hans Rosbaud achieved at the
premiere in 1961 (though not in the studio
recording that has been released by ColLegno), and which he might have found,
too, in Nott's remarkable account.
'Clear or Cloudy' provides, nevertheless,
a good, economical introduction to Ligeti's
music and, for the already captivated,
brings some important performances back
to life. What it lacks- such as any choral
music other than Lux aterna, or any solo
piano compositions beside two of the
Etudes- can be supplied from the Sony-
Teldec series. Then, of course, there is
always room for alternative views, such as
come from several other fine recordings.
Among these are Peter Eötvös's disc with
the Ensemble Modern devoted to the cello,
piano and chamber concertos (also on
Sony), Fredrick Ullén's two piano albums
(on BIS), in which a couple of the études
go at startling speed, and Gábor Csalog's
more poetic way with this music in his
recent anthology of études by Ligeti and
Liszt (on BMC).
The releases involving Csalog and
Eötvös (with Miklós Perényi adding value in
the Cello Concerto) point up what is
otherwise a puzzling dearth of recordings
by Hungarian musicians and ensembles.
There may once have been political reasons
for that (though the Chamber Concerto was
recorded by András Mihály for Hungaroton
in the 1970s), and Ligeti himself, proud of
his international standing, probably
resisted a close identification with performers
from his native land. But despite all
that, it is bizarre that Ligeti's large body of
choral music- most of it with words in
Hungarian and melodic connections with
Hungarian folksong- has been recorded
only by choirs from France (on EMI) and
Britain (on Sony).
As one listens to the Deutsche Grammophon
set, in which no Hungarian musician
takes part, it is impossible not to recognize
what Ligeti retained from Hungary, long
after he had created his own world. The
second movement of the Violin Concerto
revives the real or imagined folk melody
that had appeared four decades earlier in
the Sonata for solo cello. Often in the
études one hears patterns of four short
phrases balancing one another- blueprints
of folksong remaining after everything else
has been washed away. And in the Piano
Concerto, most notably in the second and
third movements, such a pattern takes on
the very particular shape of the fugue theme
from Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion
and Celesta.
Ligeti was immense in his knowledge,
and the uses to which he put it. Ligeti was,
like all great artists, bigger than any nation.
Ligeti was also, part of him, homegrown.
Paul Griffiths
is the author of books on Stravinsky, Bartók, the string quartet and, most recently, of
The Penguin Companion to Classical Music (2004).
