There’s little doubt that Ligeti’s Violin Concerto has become one of the select repertoire items of the last decade. Christina Astrand’s account offers a radically different approach from Saschko Gawriloff’s premiere recording, and an intermittently successful one at best. The problem stems from the diffuse recorded ambience, which blurs the definition between the soloist and Ligeti’s acutely balanced chamber orchestra, so that the timbral subtleties become dissolved. The outer movements are reduced to a garish anarchy in more densely scored passages, while the Bartokian resonances of the ‘Aria’ and the layered accumulation of the ‘Passacaglia’ take on a hysteria alien to the powerful emotion which Ligeti so objectively distils. The Gawriloff/Boulez partnership remains far preferable, but if Frank-Peter Zimmermann’s recording surfaces in Sony’s Ligeti Edition, it may achieve the balance between precision and spontaneity this music ideally needs, but which is yet to be achieved on disc.
The Per Norgard works are welcome additions to his growing discography. Helle Nacht is the last in a triptych of string concertos written in the mid-1980s. The luminosity of the central movements recalls the subtly variegated textures of the Fourth Symphony, while the abrupt, uneasy swinging between simplicity and complexity in the outer movements anticipate the multi-layered continuity of the Fifth. A transitional work, perhaps, but played here with compulsive artistry, and with greater sonic depth than that accorded dedicatee Anton Kontra (EMI Denmark, not generally available in the UK). The Secret Melody Sonata is Norgard at his most direct: five traversals of a varied and inflected melodic line which need never reveal itself. Touchingly realised by Astrand, it completes a welcome and – reservations over the Ligeti notwithstanding – recommendable disc.'