The Ligeti Project II

Opting to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey on TV when I was ill with chicken-pox as a teenager wasn't the best choice, as the flashing imagery and discordant music only served to make me feel worse than I had before. If I thought about it at all, I may have supposed the more terrifying soundtrack cues had been composed specifically for the film. Not so: this was an unhappy early encounter with the music of György Ligeti.

In 1999 a colleague was listening to something on a Discman-style personal stereo that provoked a variety of grimaces and, ultimately, a big smile. Upon my inquiring what it was, he lent me the CD - called Wien Modern - which included Ligeti's works 'Atmosphères' (one of the pieces used in 2001) and 'Lontano'. Startled and moved to similar facial contortions by what I heard, I would have bought a copy for myself had the album still been available.

A couple of years later there came the first in a series of five CD releases collecting Ligeti's orchestral output: The Ligeti Project. I bought them all as they came out. Volume II is my favourite of the set, including as it does both 'Atmosphères' and 'Lontano', albeit in cooler & less exuberant performances than I'd heard on Wien Modern. It doesn't get played often, but there are occasions when it's just the right thing, such as Christmas: for years I've been in the habit of listening to harsh mid-century modern classical on Christmas mornings, as a bracingly sour aperitif to the glut of sweetness ahead. Among the other compositions on the disc is an early work, the delightful 'Concert Românesc', which is an altogether atypical in his œuvre in its conventional melodies and driving rhythms,

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...

This is a Recording

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