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Rating: The idea of collecting the complete works of György Ligeti in monographic CDs is credited to Sony Classical: it was 1996 when the first volume of the series, the György Ligeti Edition, was released. Seven more volumes would follow, but as we will see, Sony will not complete the project.
Many of Ligeti's compositions had already been recorded and published, first on vinyl and then on CD, but it's known that having a complete collection at hand without having to jump between various record editions is convenient.
Volume 1 collects the works for strings: quartets and duets. When Ligeti wrote his first quartet between 1953 and 1954, he had the example of Bartók and his six formidable Quartets ahead of him. He gave it a subtitle that is a whole program, "Metamorphoses nocturnes", and indeed, in the 20-minute duration of this piece, articulated in eight parts, we witness the continuous transformation of the theme presented at the beginning until it becomes unrecognizable, and the dialectic between the slow and calm parts opposed to the lively and capricious ones that form the skeleton of the piece.
Several years passed before Ligeti wrote again for this ensemble: his second (and last) quartet dates from 1968. Here he had fully matured his language, and indeed, this work is a small anthology of the techniques developed in the '50s and '60s: it also lasts 20 minutes, but in this case, the five parts are very different from each other. Worth noting is the third, almost entirely realized with the pizzicato technique: "like a precision mechanism" reads the expressive indication in the score, and not by chance, Ligeti was fascinated by clocks, metronomes, and mechanical objects; while the fifth part must be executed with delicacy, "like a cloud": this is Ligeti, the composer who wrote a piece titled "Clocks and Clouds".
The CD contains three other pieces, these indeed as world premiere recordings: the brief "Hommage à Hilding Rosenberg" for violin and cello from 1982, and two pieces from 1950: the "Ballata e Danza" for two violins and "Andante e Allegretto" for string quartet. They do not add particular novelties to what was already known about the Hungarian composer, but the two youthful pieces are still interesting, providing us with a glimpse of the 27-year-old György before he became the Ligeti we know.
This, then, is volume 1 of the Ligeti Edition signed by Sony. The project was interrupted in 1999 with volume 8: an edition of the musical theater work "Le Grand Macabre". Thus, after this release, it will be up to others to take up the baton...
Tracklist
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