György Ligeti - The Ligeti Project 5

Fifth volume of Teldec's 'The Ligeti Project' (not to be confused with Sony's Ligeti Edition).

Continuing previous valuable interzone and soloweb uploads of volumes 1, 2 and 4 here is the volume 5.

The Ligeti Project Volume 5 includes:

Aventures, Nouvelles Aventures (1962-65)
Artikulation for tape (1958)
Eight Pieces from ‘Musica ricercata’ (1950-53)
Sonata for Solo Cello (1948-53)
The Big Turtle Fanfare from the South China Sea (1949)
Ballad and Dance (1950)
Old Hungarian Ballroom Dances (1949)

Sarah Leonard (soprano), Linda Hirst (mezzo), Omar Ebrahim (baritone); Max Bonnay (accordion), David Geringas (cello), Peter Masseurs (trumpet);Asko Ensemble; Schoenberg Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw
Recorded at Studio for Electronic Music, WDR, Cologne, Feb.1958 (Artikulation), Sendesaal Deutschland Radio, Cologne, March 1995 (Musica ricercata), Stichting Muziekcentrum, Hilversum, Sept. 2000 (Fanfare), Muziekcentrum Vredenburg, Utrecht, Sept. 2001 (Ballroom Dances, Ballad and Dance), Teldex Studio, Berlin, May 2002 (Cello Sonata) and live at the Theater Felix Merites, Amsterdam, May 2002 (Aventures, Nouvelles Aventures)

From Tony Haywood review:

… The meatiest items here are undoubtedly Aventures, Nouvelles Aventures, Ligeti’s astoundingly original experiments in what the human voice is capable of. Scored for three singers and seven instruments, it comes from possibly his most radical period in the early 1960s, and is easily on a par (certainly in terms of shock tactics) with Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King or Berio’s Sequenza III. This could be classed as ‘music, but not as we know it’, and the singers are called upon to emit all manner of weird and wonderful sounds. Ligeti admits to trying an emulation of his electronic ideas with human voices, so forget text and translations here.
The short tape piece Artikulation comes next and demonstrates the link Ligeti speaks of between his vocal and electronic experiments. Unlike Aventures, it sounds slightly dated now as studio work has advanced so much, but it is an effective example of doodlings in musique concrète.
After these experiences, the rest of the disc will either strike you as welcome relief or too ordinary to bother with. Personally, I like to hear this sort of juxtaposition, as it shows how far a composer’s musical language has developed.
The Musica Ricercata started out life as eleven piano pieces which were later transcribed for the bayan (a type of Russian accordion) by the Paris accordion virtuoso Max Bonnay.
The Big Turtle Fanfare is a 37 second piece for solo trumpet, a melodic remnant from incidental music Ligeti wrote for a Chinese puppet play.
The Cello Sonata is also quite short (around 8 minutes) but is packed full of invention and expressive mood swings. It may well be the discovery of the disc for some.
The final items fittingly go back to the composer’s Bartókian folk roots. The Old Hungarian Ballroom Dances were written while he was still a student at the Budapest Musical Academy.
The Ballad and Dance explores similar territory, this time for school orchestra, and uses material that crops up later in his nationalistic Romanian Concerto, already featured on Volume 2.

See full Tony Haywood review here: http://tinyurl.com/LP5-review



All credits for this volume go to the most respected original uploader, You know who you are.