Ligeti Edition [Box set]

It's great that Sony has now reissued the entire Ligeti Edition, all 9 discs, in one box (no jewel cases, discs in cardboard sleeves). I would give it 5 stars, especially at the price (about $4/disc if you pay full price), but the compositions are not all of the highest quality, so I've tried to be realistic with my rating for the benefit of those new to Ligeti. This GYORGY LIGETI WORKS box is not the place to start for someone merely curious about Ligeti. It is a necessity for anyone who is a serious fan or musicologist who does not already have the entire set as originally issued in the late 1990s. Ligeti's liner notes for each of the 8 volumes are included in both English and German, and only a few photos from the original releases are missing, so this box is a perfectly acceptable replacement for the original separate discs if you are a collector looking to complete the set.

I consider Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006) to be one of the three greatest composers of the late 20th century, along with Elliott Carter and Iannis Xenakis. But the strength of this collection is its weakness -- it includes every approved composition of Ligeti, including his earliest works from Hungary before he became known and before he developed his recognizable style. This was thanks to Ligeti's patron Vincent Meyer (who receives no mention in this box's 112-page booklet). To be precise, Sony's Ligeti Edition plus Teldec's 5-disc Ligeti Project include all of Ligeti's works in composer supervised and approved versions. The 8 volumes of the Ligeti Edition (9 discs because the opera Le Grand Macabre is 2 discs) include most of the early works, while the Ligeti Project has most of the orchestral works and most of Ligeti's best-known works.

Here is a brief overview of the contents:

Volume One -- String Quartets and Duets (5 stars)
The Arditti Quartet performs the String Quartets 1 and 2, along with a third quartet and two duets. The First Quartet (1953/4) is very much influenced by Bartok, while the Second Quartet (1968) is one of Ligeti's masterpieces of micropolyphony. There are other recordings, but none better.

Volume Two -- A Cappella Vocal Works (3 stars)
The highlights are "Lux aeterna" from 1966, another micropolyphonic masterpiece, made famous by its use in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the late period 1980s works "Drei Phantasien nach Friedrich Holderlin" and "Magyar Etudok." The rest of the disc contains early works (1945-1955) utilizing Hungarian folk music. It is all admirably performed by the London Sinfonietta, but is not riveting, at least not to me. Seemingly for Ligeti vocal specialists or a capella specialists only.

Volume Three -- Works for Piano (5 stars)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard gives Ligeti's Piano Etudes, Book One and Book Two, their definitive performance. These are late period masterworks which draw on a multitude of sources including Chopin, Debussy, Bill Evans, Conlon Nancarrow, and the xylophone music of sub-Saharan Africa.

Volume Four -- Vocal Music (4 stars)
The highlights here are both old and new. The "Nonsense Madrigals" (1988-1993) had not been recorded previously, and were first heard on the original 1996 Sony disc. Sung by a male vocal sextet and drawing mainly on Lewis Carroll, the Madrigals are hugely entertaining. "Aventures" (1962) and "Nouvelles Aventures" (1962-65) had long been considered among Ligeti's best works, and among the best-known due to their use in 2001. Also included is a piece for soprano & ensemble adapted from Le Grand Macabre, and several early works for soprano and piano.

Volume Five -- Mechanical Music (2 stars)
This is the least listenable disc of the nine. The bulk of it is music for automatic barrel organ, which I can't help thinking of as baseball music. Also included are Nancarrow-inspired works for player piano. And finally, the Fluxus happening from 1962, the "Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes," which might have been fun to watch at its premiere (shock the bourgeoisie!), but is simply painful to listen to. There are no interesting phase effects discernable to my ear, though Ligeti claims this as Reich-style phase music that he created independently of Riley and Reich.

Volume Six -- Keyboard Works (3 stars)
The most interesting works here are the severe "Three Pieces for Two Pianos" (1976), performed by Aimard and Irina Kataeva, and three 1978 pieces for harpsichord. Most of the rest of the disc consists of light, charming early works for piano duet.

Volume Seven -- Chamber Music (3 stars)
There are four major works here, but I find only two to be compelling. The late "Trio for Violin, Horn & Piano" (1982) is quite lugubrious. I wish Ligeti had written for the oboe instead of the horn. The "Sonata for Solo Viola" (1991-94) is similarly laborious to my ears. What I seek out on this disc are two wonderful wind quintets, the "Six Bagatelles" (1953) and the "Ten Pieces" (1968), which applies micropolyphony with delightful results.

Volume Eight -- Le Grand Macabre (3 stars)
While amusing, I find Ligeti's opera, originally written in the 1970s, to be dated, a low slapstick story of the Apocalypse with a gleeful antiauthoritarian streak much like the classic Monty Python skits from a few years earlier. It is well worth hearing, though as with most opera, I think it suffers without the visuals. The original from 1998 is still available with the complete libretto, which is not included in this new box.

My recommendation for anyone interested in Ligeti's music is to start with the 5-disc Ligeti Project box. It has two advantages over this set: 1) the compositions are of more consistently excellent quality, including most of Ligeti's orchestral writing, and 2) the discs are more engagingly programmed, so you are not faced with an entire disc of a cappella or piano or barrel organ music. Another similarly diverse and excellent collection is the Deutsche Grammophon box Clear or Cloudy, with alternative performances to those in the Ligeti Edition and Ligeti Project sets. Then, if you like what you hear, move on to this box.

Amazing. Sony has packaged the eight Ligeti Edition albums into a nine-CD box set that is currently available for as little as two bucks per disk. Grab it and complement it with the five-disk Ligeti Project box set from Teldec, and you will have practically every surviving Ligeti composition at your fingertips. If you're even marginally interested in the work of one postmodernism's greatest composers, then scooping up this bargain item while you can is an absolute no-brainer.

Now to the music: like Beethoven and Stravinsky, Ligeti's output is commonly divided into three distinct style periods. First are the early works from his pre-flight years. They're a combination of juvenilia, Eastern European folklorist works, pieces inhabiting a Bartókian sound world, and the occasional example of internationalist or modernist experimentation that hints at what was to come. Most of these compositions are of minor importance outside of a Ligeti immersion experience. But a handful, such as the First String Quartet and some of the movements from Musica Ricercata, are worthy of his more mature works.

The heart of Ligeti's output, and the basis for the consensus that places him among the 20th Century's most important composers, is the series of masterworks written during his middle period, which lasted from roughly 1957 (after his escape from Hungary) to 1977 (marked by the completion of his opera Le Grand Macabre). The "sound surface" compositions from the period, including Atmosphères, the Requiem, Lux Aeterna and much of the Second String Quartet, fall into a genre of acoustic music that was not unique to Ligeti -- it's also associated with Penderecki and Xenakis, and more peripherally with composers like Lutoslawski -- but Ligeti was arguably the greatest of the lot. Central to this musical language is the elevation of timbre as the most important musical parameter, supplanting the traditional pitch-priority that had been dominant in Western art music since its inception. Ligeti's vocabulary in these works consists largely of tone clusters, either in sustained notes, or as the unfolding of many rapidly moving chromatically undulating lines, in both cases creating a composite texture where the primary impression is of the resulting tone color, rather than the melodic or harmonic implications of any individual instrumental line. It is this music that came to wider attention through its use by Kubrick in the monolith and stargate sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was often called "space music" by people who picked up on that particular association.

Other works from this period follow a model developed in Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, which are closer to the serial pointillist style of many post-WW2 composers, but with an emphasis on color and rhythmic gestures in a way characteristic of Ligeti (and more musically interesting than many of the more formulaic works of Ligeti's colleagues). A third kind of work from this period explores polymeters and rhythmic phase patterns. In the former category falls the third movements from the both the Chamber Concerto and Second String Quartet. In the latter category would be Continuum and the Three Pieces for Two Pianos.

Le Grand Macabre, by far the lengthiest of Ligeti's works, represented a culmination of his middle period work, and additionally introduced an element of postmodern pastiche. After this, Ligeti seemed to be at an impasse. Not wanting to go on rewriting works like Atmosphères and Aventures over and over, Ligeti, like Beethoven, fell relatively silent for a few years. Then, in 1982, the horn trio, followed by the first of the piano etudes, launched a third style period. These late works represent a conservative retrenchment from Ligeti's more experimental middle period works, in rather the same way that Stravinsky's neoclassical period constituted a step back from the experimentation of his youth. Many of Ligeti's late works, including the horn trio, are unabashedly neoclassical, and return to an emphasis on pitch-priority and musical gestures. Still, Ligeti resisted the most hackneyed temptations to which some of his colleagues succumbed (e.g., Penderecki's and Rochberg's forgettable attempts to time-travel back to the 19th Century).

Several of these late works have found considerable favor with performers, as they are generally (but not always!) easier to perform, eschew the extended playing techniques of Ligeti's earlier works, and are less challenging for casual listeners. But I'm confident that Ligeti's historical legacy will ultimately depend on his middle period works, rather than the more conventional compositions written between 1982 and the end of his career in roughly 2001.

So, which of these works do you get with this set? Sony's Ligeti Edition started with seven single CD albums focusing on vocal, keyboard and small ensemble works, arranged by medium. Thus LE1 features the string quartets, with most of the rest of the chamber music on LE7. Keyboard music is on LE3 (piano Etudes) and LE6 (everything else, including some important works for organ and harpsichord). LE2 has the a cappella choral works, including the famous Lux Aeturna setting, while LE4 has the works for voices and small ensemble, including Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures. LE5 is an oddity. Devoted to "mechanical music", it includes one original work (the notorious Poème Symphonique), and several arrangements of other Ligeti works for things like player piano and barrel organ. There's plenty to read about each of those albums by clicking on the links provided above.

Later, Sony added the double CD LE8, devoted to Le Grand Macabre. But for the other big instrumental works, including the orchestral music and the Requiem, you're referred to the five aforementioned Teldec Ligeti Project CDs. Together, these 14 CDs will give you an almost-complete collection of Ligeti's sanctioned works. You will be missing some piano music: three of the four Piano Etudes from Book 3, the Three Bagatelles for David Tudor (from 1961, consisting of a single note), and a work of juvenilia called Chromatic Fantasy that Ligeti withdrew but is still worth a listen. Also missing is the string orchestra version of Ramifications (though the version for 12 solo strings is recorded in Ligeti Project 4), and the tape piece Glissandi from 1957 (available on an old Wergo recording). A third short tape piece, simply called Pièce Électronique No. 3, was sketched in 1958, but not realized until a 1996 residency in the Netherlands. Also nice to have would have been the original German version of Le Grand Macabre, which you might be able to track down from another Wergo recording.

If you're not a convinced Ligeti fan/completist, you might consider getting the four-CD Deutsche Grammophon set as an alternative to Ligeti Edition and Ligeti Project. That way, every track will be an important piece of music, with no early period fluff to contend with. But either way, sit back with open ears and mind, some good headphones and a quiet place -- and scores if you can find them at your local library -- and transport yourself back to the heady days of the 1960s or 1970s while you imagine (or relive) being blown away by these sounds when hearing them for the first time.