György Ligeti

Ligeti's creative outlook has been formed by his experiences under two dictatorships – those of Hitler and Stalin. A Jew born in Transylvania just as Hungary was losing that region to Romania, he survived World War II in a labour camp (his brother and father both died in Auschwitz). Following the war, he studied and taught at the Budapest Academy, but fled after the crushing of the anti-Soviet uprising in 1956. Arriving in Cologne, he became an associate of Stockhausen at the WDR electronic music studio, where he rapidly caught up on the musical developments from which he had been cut off in Hungary. In the 1960s he emerged as a leading member of the international avant-garde. Since then he has lived mostly in Hamburg and Vienna, becoming an Austrian citizen in 1967.

As Ligeti has remarked of the traumatic experiences that have shaped his life and artistic outlook: "I am permanently scarred; I will be overcome by revenge fantasies to the end of my days." And yet, despite his work's penchant for the surreal and the grotesque, he is one of the most approachable, as well as one of the most fascinating and compelling, of postwar composers. A feeling of loss and nostalgia characterizes much of his output, often evoked by the haunting modalities of East European folk music – most obviously in the early Hungarian period directly influenced by Bartók, from which come the delightful Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet of 1953. But pathos is balanced by absurdist humour, as in the notorious twenty-minute Poème symphonique for 100 Metronomes (1962), a piece of "mechanical music" which lasts until the last device finally stops beating.

The mechanical is one aspect of the "clocks and clouds" ethos that made Ligeti's name in the early 1960s (a piece with that title appeared in 1973). In Atmosphères (1961) and other "cloud" pieces such as Apparitions and Lontano , Ligeti rejected the serial complexities favoured by contemporaries such as Stockhausen and Boulez in favour of a "micropolyphony" which suspends pulse and harmony. Clusters of adjacent sounds were used to achieve slow, seamless change, most famously in Lux Aeterna for unaccompanied voices, in which fine gradations of pitch create a kind of warped polyphony. (It was used in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001 .) At the same time, Ligeti's maverick sense of humour expressed itself in the quasi-theatrical Aventures and Nouvelles aventures , a pair of exuberant vocal works setting nonsense phonetic texts, and the imposing Requiem , Ligeti's summatory early work, which combines the sound-mass textures of the orchestral pieces and the zany theatricals of Aventures to disturbing effect.

The cloudy sound-masses of these early works are typically created out of microscopic tangles of intertwined instrumental lines – a kind of musical spider's web, described by the composer as "micro-polyphony". In Ligeti's works of the later 1960s and early 1970s the lines gradually become clearer, reintroducing a sense – albeit a rather peculiar one – of melody, counterpoint and harmony, while rhythm also resurfaces, often in the form of crazily superimposed pulses or psychotically fast instrumental outbursts, like the deranged functioning of some vast mechanical instrument. In works such as the Chamber Concerto , Melodien and the Double Concerto for flute and oboe Ligeti pushes this style to its limits, creating a compellingly strange musical world, at once eerie and beautiful.

Ligeti's major project of the 1970s, the opera Le Grand Macabre , summed up all his previous creative preoccupations and sowed many of the seeds which were to germinate in subsequent works. Following the opera's premiere in 1978 and a period of serious illness, Ligeti's style underwent a profound evolution, as first demonstrated by the moving Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano of 1982, a work in which a kind of tonality and traditional metre reappear in his work for the first time in over two decades, but lopsided or dislocated to comic or disturbing effect. It was in subsequent works – most notably two prodigious concertos, for piano and violin, and an ongoing sequence of études for piano (currently numbering 17) – that Ligeti's creative trajectory reached its destination. In all these works there are overt references to traditional classical (and other) music, often with a decidedly Eastern European flavour, but recontextualized in Ligeti's inimitably personal manner and often expressed in a complex rhythmic style in which conflicting layers of tempi are used to drive the music forward.

Ligeti is beyond tonality and atonality, and beyond postmodernism – "the ironic theatricalizing of the past is quite foreign to me". He is utterly unique, but until recently he has been sparsely served on disc; Sony began to rectify this with a superb Complete Ligeti Edition, a commendably adventurous series that has now been taken over by Teldec.

Le Grand Macabre

Ligeti's lengthiest work is Le Grand Macabre , a savage burlesque written for Stockholm Opera between 1974 and 1977. Set in "Breughelland", a world derived from the visionary paintings of Breughel and Bosch, the opera depicts the end of the world, as experienced by a gang of grotesques – among them the infantile Prince Go-Go, the permanently intoxicated Piet the Pot, the love-struck Amando and Amanda, the cross-dressing astrologer Astradamors and his sluttish wife Mescalina, who at one point gets ravaged by the opera's master of ceremonies, Nekrotzar, a pseudo-Antichrist who claims to have been sent to announce the end of the world, but who, on the point of terminating creation, instead falls over in a drunken stupor. It's a two-hour musical helter-skelter, as raucously enjoyable as anything written since the war.

Musically, the opera shows Ligeti at his most diverse, featuring such strikingly offbeat inspirations as a parodic overture for 12 car horns and the portentous orchestral march – composed out of snatches of ragtime and cha-cha superimposed on a mutilated theme from Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony – to which Nekrotzar enters the palace of Breughelland. Not everything is slapstick, however: the radiant music sung by Amando and Amanda is as unaffectedly beautiful as anything Ligeti has written, while the concluding passacaglia is at once simple and touching, being composed entirely out of disjointed tonal chords – a perfect musical parallel to the topsy-turvy kingdom of Breughelland.

Full Price - Davis, Walmsley-Clark, Smith, Weller, Krekow; Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Howarth
Wergo WER 6170-2; 2 CDs

This live recording of Le Grand Macabre reinforces the argument that it is likely to prove one of the most durable of modern operas; the singers vividly characterize Ligeti's eccentric creations, and the sound is superb.

Chamber Concerto

The Chamber Concerto (1969–70) is perhaps the finest of the rich sequence of concerto-like works which Ligeti composed during the late 1960s and early 1970s (others are the Cello Concerto of 1966, Melodien for chamber orchestra of 1971, and the Double Concerto for flute and oboe of 1972). The work is scored for a small ensemble of thirteen virtuoso performers, featuring winds, strings and two keyboard players – a relatively traditional instrumental line-up, though one from which Ligeti manages to conjure the most outlandish sonorities, while a Hammond organ adds a distinctively sepulchral touch to some of the concerto's spookier moments. The piece explores in characteristically Ligetian fashion the contrast between dream-like stasis and frantic activity, as the drifting, underwater sonorities of the first two movements are gradually transformed into the headlong finale, with its helter-skelter instrumental crossfire. Standing somewhat apart is the third movement, a kind of crazy scherzo composed out of a deranged melee of conflicting pulses, like a room full of machines gone haywire – one of Ligeti's most memorable creations.

Full Price - Schönberg Ensemble; de Leeuw
Teldec 8573-83953-2; with Melodien, Piano Concerto & Mysteries of the Macabre

This marvellous recording is the best single-CD introduction to Ligeti's work, featuring some of his finest pieces, both early and late. In lesser hands, works such as the Chamber Concerto can sometimes sound merely grotesque, but here Reinbert de Leeuw and his excellent performers deliver the work's outlandish textures with consummate musicality, allowing its obscure logic and strange beauty to emerge with compelling force. Couplings include Melodien, the masterly Piano Concerto (see below), and the relatively lightweight Mysteries of the Macabre – a miniature trumpet concerto based on extracts from Le Grand Macabre.

Mid Price - Ensemble InterContemporain; Boulez
Deutsche Grammophon 423 244-2; with String Quartet No.2, Ramifications, Aventures & Lux Aeterna

A classic recording offering a good selection of his chamber, vocal and choral works from the 1960s. Though less ingratiating than de Leeuw's, Boulez's reading of the Chamber Concerto has its own palpable authority, while the La Salle Quartet offer a still unsurpassed reading of the closely related String Quartet No. 2, composed the year before. The zany Aventures and the hypnotic Lux Aeterna complete the disc.

Piano Concerto & Violin Concerto

Written back-to-back between 1985 and 1992, the Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto together demonstrate the full expressive range of Ligeti's later output. The driving force behind the mercurial Piano Concerto (as behind the contemporaneous Piano Études ) is essentially rhythmic, particularly in the work's first, third and fifth movements, which generate an irresistible verve out of their endlessly colliding cross-rhythms and jauntily swung melodies. These enclose two further movements: the second, a strange lament (joined at one point, to memorable effect, by a slide whistle); the fourth, a kind of musical jigsaw puzzle, whose initially fragmentary and stuttering utterances gradually freewheel into chaos, with irresistibly comic effect.

Compared to the precise, mechanical fantasies of the Piano Concerto , the Violin Concerto is an altogether more rhapsodic work, employing a wider range of musical material and reference – most strikingly in the second movement, based on a chorale-like melody of disarming directness which teeters on the brink of outright nostalgia until, with characteristic humour, being rudely reprised on mistuned pipes. As in the Piano Concerto , the vigorous outer movements delve deeply into Ligeti's box of rhythmic tricks, though here the effect is wilder and more impassioned, evoking the fiddle traditions of Eastern Europe.

Full Price - Piano Concerto; Violin Concerto: Gawriloff; Aimard; Ensemble InterContemporain; Boulez
Deutsche Grammophon 439 808-2; with Cello Concerto

Of the two recordings currently available of the Violin Concerto, this is the better, with Saschko Gawriloff – who premiered the work and helped compose the fifth-movement cadenza – the capable soloist, ably supported by the Ensemble InterContemporain directed by Pierre Boulez. The supple rhythms of the Piano Concerto fare rather less well under Boulez's direction, while the recorded sound does no favours to soloist Pierre Laurent-Aimard, who labours mightily but often inaudibly amongst the orchestral mayhem.

Full Price - Piano Concerto: Aimard; Schönberg Ensemble; de Leeuw
Teldec 8573-83953-2; with Chamber Concerto, Melodien & Mysteries of the Macabre

Pierre Laurent-Aimard's second recording of the Piano Concerto is an altogether happier affair, with Reinbert de Leeuw's more sympathetic accompaniment allowing the work's rhythmic snap and comic verve to emerge with irresistible effect.

Piano Études

Ligeti completed his first book of piano études in 1985, the second in 1993, and he is currently working on a third set. As ambitious and profound as the studies of Chopin and Debussy, Ligeti's études virtually reinvent an instrument which had been largely sidelined by the musical avant-garde, creating effects of a complexity which is all the more compelling for being produced by just a single performer. Like much of Ligeti's recent music, the études are founded on the complex interplay of different rhythms and tempi. Many of the pieces are fast and furious, with conflicting rhythmic layers emerging out of a flurry of notes, as in the anarchic first étude, Désordre , or the Mephistophelean thirteenth, L'escalier du diable ; others are more reflective, as in the radiant Arc-en-ciel or the haunting Cordes vides . Finest of all, however, is the sixth étude, Automne à Varsovie , in which as many as four overlapping tempi are used to conjure up a mistily impressionist veil of sound – a marvellous union of poetry and technique, at once beautifully evocative and utterly original.

Full Price - Aimard
Sony SK 62308; with Musica Ricercata

Of the surprising number of recordings available of the first two books of études, this is undoubtedly the best. Aimard manages the technical difficulties of Ligeti's polyrhythmic approach with complete assurance, while bringing out a kaleidoscopic array of nuances and gradations of colour. This exceptional disc also includes a single étude from the third book, along with the wonderful Musica Ricercata sequence from the 1950s – Stanley Kubrick, always a fan of Ligeti, sampled it for the soundtrack of Eyes Wide Shut.