Gyorgy Ligeti piano etudes

[michaelab]

I got a recording of these recently for £4.99 on Naxos, performed by Idil Beret. I must say it was a bit of a punt because I'd heard very little about/of Ligeti and had never heard of Idil Beret the pianist (he seems to be a Naxos favourite ), but for £4.99 you can't really go wrong!

See here for the Naxos page about this CD including downloadable samples and info.

Generally I'm not overly keen on late 20th century music allthough piano music has been easier for me, maybe because as a pianist (well, I play the piano - pianist implies a level of talent ) I can more easily relate to it.

What a pleasant surprise then that I absolutely loved this CD. Influences of Debussy and Ravel are quite clear to hear but, as the notes on the Naxos site say, this music is neither, avant-garde nor traditional, neither atonal nor tonal. The etudes are all very harmonically rich and extremely rhythmic - influences of african drumming and its complex rhythms is very evident and makes the music (to me at least) very accessible and quite infectious to listen to. One of the etudes (L'escalier du diable) makes extraordinarly original use of the upper ranges of the piano keyboard, using it's more percussive sound to great effect. The music defintely has more structure and complexity than "minimalist" music but IMO it's almost as accessible and very enjoyable to listen to.

The Naxos recording btw is excellent. It's very hard to record solo piano well and they've done an excellent job. Idil Beret also impressed me - managing to play with great passion, something the music itself doesn't immediately lend itself to!

I'm now really looking forward to hearing the Ligeti Violin Concerto at the Proms on August 31st (with Tasmin Little, Berlin Phil and Simon Rattle )

Michael.

 

[GrahamN]

Radio 3 "Building a Library" did a comparative review of all extant recordings of this a couple of weeks ago. Darn - I thought they had those available to listen on demand (at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 ), but that's only for the last 7 days (Discovering music has a pretty full back catalogue on demand). Wasn't paying a lot of attention, I'm afraid, but it seemed a lot less offensive than I expected :yikes: . I actually quite like at least half the Ligeti I've heard - of course the stuff everybody knows (even if they don't know they do) is the weird stuff at the end of Kubrick's '2001' - the Lux Aeterna from his Requiem.

The top recommendations appear to have been Aimard (on Sony) and someone called Toros Can (on L'EMPREINTE DIGITALE).

Lots of Ligeti about at the moment as he's 80 this year.

 

[Todd]

Ligeti's Etudes are simply astounding. I'd be a little wary of putting too much faith in Naxos' liner notes of what Ligeti's music is or is not. Ligeti was (and remains) one of the bright lights of the avant-garde movement, but he has moved beyond it. If you want to find out what they really are all about, then splurge and buy the mid-price Aimard set on Sony. The playing is almost super-human, the sound excellent, and the interprepatations spell-binding. I've not yet heard the Biret, but I've read no really strong reviews, and just one look at the timings indicates that Biret takes them too slow. (Ligeti himself may not approve. I've read one story of how displeased the composer was when someone opted to play his Contiuum too slowly.)

 

[michaelab]

Thanks Todd - I'll look into the Aimard set. On the subject of performers playing a piece "too slowly", it's hard to say - clearly the performer didn't think it was too slow and who's too say how slow is too slow?

I also don't really like it when composers wade in with too slow/too fast comments on particular interpretations. After all, classical music is about interpretation and an interpretation is allowed to differ from the one the composer had in mind. Also, composers interpretations of their own pieces vary over time anyway. I'm a huge fan of Rachmaninov but I've heard some of his own playing on piano rolls and early recordings and I some of his interpretations are bordering on bizzarre

If composers start to accurately stipulate things like how fast their music should be played and a whole host of other things we may as well get them to enter it all into a computer and forget about interpretations

Michael.

PS: really enjoyed the violin concerto at the proms on Sunday

 

[Todd]

While I generally agree that there is not a specific, correct speed at which to play most pieces of music, in Ligeti, in particular, it is often critical. Ligeti is probably the master at creating sounds that cannot exist independently. He does all the time in his chamber pieces and orchestral pieces, using specific combinations of instruments playing specific notes for specific durations to create musical illusions. (Try some of his chamber music for winds for examples.) And part of his etudes relies specifically on the pianist playing the notes properly to produce desired effects. There are passages that he wrote to sound more complex than they are, and others to sound less complex than they are, and not playing the music as written by not following the metronome markings can destroy the effect. That was apparently the problem with Continuum. The performer (I forgot the person) played it so slowly that the harmonic effects and thus the intent of the music were ruined. Ligeti was not pleased. (And this was only about a decade after the piece was written.)

More generally, timing is indeed a relative thing. Look at how long Schubert's B flat sonata can be and still sound sublime. Likewise, no one seems to take Beethoven metronomic markings of his Op 106 sonata seriously, and it does not suffer. Sometimes, though, strict adherence to the score is needed.

 

[Herman]

I would agree with Todd that not acqainting oneself with Aimard's recordings of the Ligeti is possibly a big waste of time, Aimard being one of the most dedicated Ligeti performers around, as is attested by his having recorded some Ligeti works twice. It's really worth the extra buck to get a recording that gives you the best contact with unfamiliar music like this.

However, I recommend getting Aimard's recording of the piano concerto as well. It's a beautiful work, demonstrating (possibly) Todd's interesting theory (smiley please) of the special need in Ligeti's music to play certain notes at the same time and speed. (Ligeti is so-o-o different in that respect from, say, Mozart.) Together with the (totally different) Dutilleux Violin Cto it is my favorite contemporary concerto; these pieces get me just as viscerally as one of the Brahms concertos.

Aimard recorded the cto twice: first with Pierre Boulez conducting (the disc also includes the ciolin and cello concertos; a very attractive coupling) and the second time with Reinbert de Leeuw.

About Ligeti's need for meticulous observance of the speeds, etc. I once saw a documentary about Ligeti, centered around a performance of the Piano Concerto, conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw (Dutch conductor of contemporary music). At some point Ligeti arrived in the hall, and from that moment on the proceedings became very painful, because, indeed, Ligeti wanted everything just so. Pained grimases on the composers face, saying "how can I tell these people it should be just a nanosecond faster, slower, more this, less so".

Herman