Fredrik Ullén, who performs all of Ligeti's piano music on this two-CD set, comments in the program notes about being struck by "the immediacy of the music, in spite of its complexity." His statement pretty well sums up the enormous appeal of Ligeti's work and accounts for his standing as one of the most universally respected and popular composers of "serious" music in the second half of the twentieth century. He was able to write music that incorporated some of the most advanced technical developments of his era and make it attractive to broad audiences.
Ligeti's piano music, which spanned his career from his student days until the end of his life, offers a distilled traversal of many of the musical styles he embraced and illuminates his deepening maturity as a composer. In bringing together all of Ligeti's piano music, Ullén demonstrates the composer's mastery of a wide diversity of styles, as well as the breadth and emotional range of his vision.
Ullén places the etudes on the first disc (presumably because they are the showpiece of the set) with the remaining pieces in order of their composition on the second disc, but the listener would more profitably reverse the order to receive the full impact of the composer's development. The pieces collected here fall into three periods; works written between 1941 and 1953, when his awareness of the musical innovations of the West had been limited by his isolation in Communist-ruled Hungary, experimental pieces written after he fled to Vienna in 1956 and was exposed to the influences of the Darmstadt School, and pieces written in the mature style of the etudes. The revelation of the earlier works is how marvelously entertaining they are, notable for their lively inventiveness, geniality, and wit; he reveals himself as the rare composer who can express humor in music without resorting to parody or grotesquerie. After moving to the West, he wrote one piano piece in the serial tradition and one in the tradition of American experimentalism. Chromatische Phantasie, his single essay in serialism, is less engaging than the works that surround it, but that is perhaps more a function of the limitations of serialism, even in the service of an imagination as fertile as Ligeti's, to express humor or whimsy. Trois Bagatelles (1961) consists of a single short note and is an un-subtle homage to Cage, who reportedly was not amused.
The etudes are clearly the work of a composer who has absorbed and personalized a vast range of musical sources. They display the sensitivity to the emotional impact of traditional western harmony that Ligeti had developed so fluently in his youth while transforming the tradition to meet the expressive needs of a composer whose sensibilities had been hugely expanded. The timbral complexities of micropolyphony, which Ligeti developed in the late 1950s and 1960s, are in evidence in some of the densely contrapuntal later etudes. The rhythmic element, however, is the most striking feature of the etudes, and each one develops a specific rhythmic idea. Ligeti had become familiar with the intensely complex polyrhythmic music of Conlon Nancarrow, Steve Reich's phase processes, and music from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. In the etudes, these disparate influences are fully integrated into the composer's distinctive personal voice.
Ullén is a powerful and sensitive interpreter of Ligeti's music. His performances of the earlier works sparkle with rambunctiousness and wit, and he negotiates the ferociously difficult etudes with the kind of clarity and precision that the music demands. In his program notes, he discusses the etudes in terms of their rhythmic structures and that emphasis is evident in his performance. In the more lyrical etudes, such as "Arc-en-Ciel," Ullén is less successful than Pierre-Laurent Aimard in projecting the long, arching line that makes that piece so exquisitely ethereal. In the more rhythmically driven etudes, however, he is precisely on target. This set will be of strong interest to any Ligeti enthusiast or anyone eager to become familiar with some of the twentieth century's most significant and appealing piano music.