This is a richly entertaining collection, in some ways a sort of autobiography, ranging from Ligeti’s early folk-song arrangements and settings of the safely ‘classic’ poet Janos Arany (the only alternatives he had in the Hungary of the early 1950s to writing music that toed the Communist party line) to the “non-tonal but diatonic” Nonsense Madrigals, the most recent of them dating from 1993. These latter are hugely inventive, sometimes very funny, but the second word of their title is as important as their first. In his notes on them Ligeti writes of his interest in the “rhythmic-metrical complexity” of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish music, but it sounds to me (all of the texts he uses are in English) as though he knows his Morley and his Vautor pretty well, too. They are rhythmically virtuoso, full of good humour but also of a poetic use of colour and texture that reminds us that he is, diatonic or not, still the author of Atmospheres.
His inventiveness is also recognizable in some of the early pieces which, like Nonsense Madrigals, could easily become very popular. The first of the Wedding Songs is enchanting, the simple melody set for three sopranos with a piano accompaniment very close to that for Schubert’s An die Musik; the hauntingly simple line and eventful accompaniment of the second Weores poem is scarcely less attractive, and the Arany songs have delicate lyricism as well as post-Bartok folksiness. Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, those abstract mini-operas to elaborately meaningless texts, still retain their power to amuse, but also to challenge and provoke. In these excellent performances Aventures is clearly the comic opera of the pair, Nouvelles Aventures the ancestor not only of Ligeti’s preoccupation with ‘clocks and clouds’ (one of its sections is subtitled “Les horloges demoniaques”) but of the climactic work of his first 20 years in the West, Le grand macabre. Ligeti himself acknowledges that Elgar Howarth has reduced the three soprano arias from that opera “wonderfully” for chamber ensemble. The arrangement points up their alarmingly manic humour (in the opera they are sung by the burlesque-sinister Gepopo, the head of the secret police) and makes the hair-raising difficulty of the vocal line even more obvious. Ligeti proudly claims that they are the most difficult coloratura music ever written (“more difficult than Zerbinetta or the Queen of the Night. I was told it was impossible”) but Sybille Ehlert’s virtuosity is vivid. That, in fact, is the word for pretty well all the performances here, save the Schumannesque Holderlin setting Der Sommer, which Christiane Oelze sings with touching gravity. The recordings are excellently clear and incisive.'