Ligeti - Cello Concerto, etc

The Guardian 80

Ahonen/Poltéra/BIT20 Ensemble/Brönnimann
(BIS)

After the mixed reactions to the recent London performances of György Ligeti’s only opera, Le Grand Macabre, it’s good to be reminded of his true position as one of the authentically great figures in 20th-century music, with four of his finest orchestral scores.

Three of the works on conductor Baldur Brönnimann’s disc with Norwegian group BIT20 date from the period in the late 1960s and early 70s when Ligeti’s music was at the height of its most radically inventive phase. The fourth, the Piano Concerto, completed in 1988, was one of the most substantial of the works that followed his abrupt change of style in the early 80s, when the “clocks and clouds” of his earlier music were replaced by the use of non-western scales and rhythmic patterns.