Search - Gyorgy Ligeti, Pierre-Laurent Aimard :: György Ligeti Edition 3: Works for Piano (Etudes, Musica Ricercata) - Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Not my favorite Ligeti, but might be yours

Michael Schell | www.schellsburg.com | 12/08/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Alas, I've never warmed to Ligeti's Piano Etudes, which I generally find to be a dilution of his more remarkable middle period works, or in some cases a pale imitation of the work of other musicians. Compare, for example, the first Etude (Disordre), to Ruth Crawford's Study in Mixed Accents written half a century earlier. Several etudes owe an unabashed debt to Nancarrow, but lack the latter's eccentric sincerity (player pianos, boogie-woogie rhythms and all that). More than a few resemble a Cecil Taylor solo, but with an added dose of pretense. And they all compare unfavorably to Ligeti's own Three Pieces for Two Piano, written in the 1970s while he was still finding ways to extend his musical language in the dimensions of rhythm and texture.



It's also disappointing that the composer of so much timbrally-extended music would give us an hour's worth of short piano pieces without any exploration of extended playing techniques or new instrumental sounds. Everything is played on the keys in the conventional way, ignoring the possibilities opened up by Cage, Crumb, Cowell, Stockhausen and others. Nor is there any exploration of alternative intonation or harmonics. And then there's the fundamental problem of listening to an hour's worth of short pieces that don't particularly combine to form architectonic structures beyond the length of a single movement.



Although I think future composers will share this assessment, contemporary judgment may not. And since these pieces only require a single performer, and are written in a more familiar style than Ligeti's great middle period works, they do seem to get programmed far more often than, say, the Requiem (LP4). If you consider the Etudes to be the finest thing this side of Atmosphères (or for that matter, Stockhausen's Klavierstücke, Crumb's Makrokosmos and Copland's Piano Fantasy), then you certainly won't be disappointed in these performances by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, one of the leading pianists specializing in new music. The accuracy is there, the touch is immaculate, and he avoids burying the wash of notes with the loud pedal. You'll also want to have these Etudes if you're assembling a CD collection of Ligeti's music. As of December 2009, the price is definitely right at seven bucks.



Note, though, that only one of the Etudes from Book 3 was completed at the time of this recording. And neither this CD, nor LE6 gives us the Three Bagatelles for Piano written for David Tudor in 1961 or the early Chromatic Fantasy that Ligeti later withdrew. Unfortunately these aren't present in Teldec's Ligeti Project either, so to assemble a complete Ligeti collection you'll need to supplement the Sony and Teldec series with something like Fredrik Ullén's album of Ligeti's complete piano music.



Rounding out this CD is Ligeti's early Musica Ricercata collection in its original version for solo piano. Some of its movements are banal juvenilia, but others are interesting and show flashes of the insight into musical process that would burst out fully after Ligeti left Hungary. If you acquire all eight Ligeti Edition albums on Sony, and the five CDs of Teldec's Ligeti Project, then you will get a good dose of Musica Ricercata through arrangements of its movements for pipe organ (LE6, quite effective actually), barrel organ (LE5), bayan (LP5) and wind quintet (LE7).



Note that as of March 2010 Sony has made the entire Ligeti Edition series available in an inexpensive nine-CD box set that includes this CD, so you should probably just buy that set instead of this single CD if you're interested in Ligeti's music."