Of Ligeti’s five concertos, the earliest is for cello, from 1966. It’s also his least known, perhaps because the solo part doesn’t attract star soloists, who find themselves primus inter pares within an ensemble of 14 instruments, leading them from silence through a rapt unfolding of a single note for the first few minutes. The second movement is far more overtly virtuoso though no less shadowy and muted in its way, and the NEOS engineers have found an excellent balance for Nicolas Altstaedt and his colleagues in the Italian PluralEnsemble, more eerily atmospheric than the DG recording (1/95) and more detailed than the German radio set-up for Siegfried Palm (RCA – nla). As the work’s dedicatee and first performer, he makes as much of a concerto out of the piece as he can, whereas Altstaedt is almost (not quite) lost among the nocturnal flutterings of the second movement’s variations.

The Piano Concerto demands a much more extrovert approach, and here Alberto Rosado is hard-working but restrained in both balance and temperament compared with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, especially in the second of his two recordings (Warner, 5/01). The members of PluralEnsemble evidently enjoy themselves in the riotous outer movements but Ligeti’s fiendish polyrhythmic games come closer to organised chaos the more you can hear inside them, and on Warner the Schönberg Ensemble is under the masterful control of Reinbert de Leeuw here and in Mysteries of the Macabre, the wild showpiece extracted from Gepopo’s arias in Le Grand Macabre. Now that Barbara Hannigan has stopped the show with the soprano version, this trumpet arrangement by Elgar Howarth has lost some of its anarchic force; but Marco Blaauw and the busy percussionists of PluralEnsemble make the central section swing, and Blaauw hisses his instructions (as Breughelland’s chief of police) in English rather than the German on rival recordings by Peter Masseurs and Håkan Hardenberger.