Ligeti’s piano Etudes – 15 at the last count – are really special. His interest in composing with layers of material in different metres or different tempos, in new forms of rhythmic articulation and in producing what he calls “an illusion of rhythm” goes back at least to the early 1960s. Anyone who has enjoyed Continuum – his short piece of 1968 for harpsichord, which has been recorded several times – can look back on it from the vantage-point of these Etudes and see that it was anything but a one-off jeu d’esprit. In fact, one of the 15 – No. 10, “Der Zauberlehrling” (“The sorcerer’s apprentice”) – turns out to be its close cousin, though rather more grown-up.
No. 15, “White on White”, has been designated the first in Book 3, so it looks as if more are to come. His studies aim to facilitate, in Ligeti’s words, “the illusion of simultaneously progressive layers of tempo, using only one player”, as opposed to the polyrhythmic studies of Conlon Nancarrow, written for pianola, and the polyrhythmic features in sub-Saharan African music which require at least two musicians. These were influences – or perhaps I should say a major stimulus to his imagination – in the 1980s when Ligeti was working on Book 1 (the first six etudes) and his Piano Concerto.
The other impetus given to the composition of many of the 15 came from his realization that there were parallels between his musical procedures and some of the structures being revealed by modern mathematics, in particular the young science of dynamical systems which seeks to explain the precarious balance between order and disorder, pattern and chaos. Such volatility has indeed been a preoccupation and at the heart of his music since Apparitions and Atmospheres, the orchestral pieces of 1960 and 1961 which first made him widely known in Europe. But I mustn’t be misunderstood. The music is the thing. You don’t need to be able to follow Ligeti’s interest in fractal geometry, dynamical systems, deterministic chaos and the rest to respond to his music. And yet if you’ve ever pondered the bringing together of humanist and scientific cultures that were once not so divergent (“there’s a common place in our spirit where the beauty of mathematics and the beauty of music meet” – Ligeti again), or if you’ve been provoked perhaps by Richard Dawkins’s recent Dimbleby lecture, you will be off to a flying start, I think, and absolutely ready to react to these dazzling piano pieces as the extraordinary creations they are.
Dazzling is surely the word for them. Book 1 has been around now for more than ten years and has previously been recorded by Pierre Laurent-Aimard for Erato (4/90 – nla), by Rolf Hind on Factory Classical (1/90 – nla), Volker Banfield (Wergo) and others. If you’ve already heard it, or some of the pieces, you will have been struck first of all by the music’s immediacy. The complexities are a problem only for the pianist: the new ideas have been employed only for a musical/poetic purpose. And so they are in Book 2 (Etudes Nos. 7-14). There are some correspondences with Book 1, in the same way as one senses such things when listening to the etudes of Chopin or Debussy; and, as with those, the Second Book is more diverse than the First. No. 7, “Galamb borong”, evokes an imaginary gamelan-type music in a haunting bimodal sound world, neither chromatic nor diatonic, which Ligeti has uncovered hidden away in the normal tempered tuning of the piano. No. 8, “Fem”, jazzy in feeling, is based on chords of open fifths. “Entrelacs”, No. 12, takes its title from a word from art and architecture meaning interlaced design or interwoven ornament. Nos. 9, 13 and 14 – “Vertige”, “L’escalier du diable” and “Columna infinita” – belong together in that they explore the possibilities of making musical equivalents of some of the spirals and vortices to be observed in nature, and in manmade objects such as drills and spindles, or in electroacoustic illusions such as the famous one produced by the composer Jean-Claude Risset.
Risset’s endless glissando, which appears to ascend for ever although no change of register occurs, is amazing. Ligeti, doing something similar, suggests an infinity of giddy spiralling movement which is even more amazing. And with No. 14 Book 2 comes to a frenetic conclusion, apparently at the limits of pianistic possibilities and expression. But Book 2 has impressive variety too. I’m sure there is merit in hearing all of it in sequence, as there is with the collections of Chopin and Debussy – and mentioning those again impels me to suggest that a nod in the direction of Liszt is probably also in order, who opened up a world of sound on the piano as Chopin had done, as Debussy was to do and as Ligeti has done here. How Liszt would have enjoyed “L’escalier du diable”!
Had I been reviewing Fredrik Ullen’s BIS recording on its own I would have been happy to recommend it wholeheartedly. He is Swedish, born in 1968 and a bachelor of medicine specializing in neuroscience as well as a formidable pianist, which is enough to make you gasp before you listen to him. His disc comes as “The Complete Ligeti Piano Music, Volume 1”; it was made in a studio of the Swedish Radio, is well produced and presented, with most readable annotations by him as well as by Ove Nordwall. He plays 14 Etudes – Books 1 and 2, but does not include No. 15. The complement on his disc of much earlier Ligeti pieces is good to have. Yet the comparison with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, which has to be made, is not to his advantage. There’s nothing to choose between them in manipulative ability, but the quality of Sony Classical’s sound is superior in depth, range of colour and character, and most importantly it reproduces a wider range of dynamics. The wider range all round is attributable to Aimard, no doubt, who certainly produces more nuances of all kinds. In general, he makes more imaginative music than Ullen and paces the pieces better, which is perhaps to be expected since he has had a longer association with them. He is an artist of phenomenal gifts, not just a modern music specialist, and I urge everyone interested in fine piano playing to hear him.
A composer friend said to me the other day, “Ligeti is wonderful, isn’t he. Everything of his, like Bartok or Kurtag, seems the stuff of music, the very body of it.” If you’ve read me this far you’ll have gathered I consider Aimard’s recording, which is one of the first to have arrived in the integrale projected by Sony, to be a match for some absolutely exceptional new music. Issues like this don’t come along often and it deserves the widest possible welcome.'