György Ligeti died in 2006, after leaving a considerable body of work which I think is marked both by experimentation, curiosity and lack of dogmatism exceptional (for a celebrated composer so if the official chapel of serial high-resolved enemies of tone).
His piano studies are a marvel of balance and freedom. This genre, very much focused on the piano from Chopin, is the exercise that is the most bizarre, composers who have played there often a very personal music and free in most formal and arid either. This was true of Chopin, Debussy, who also makes his most experimental screw Screw the tone (which in fact are quite rarely played, because I think it confuse compared to the standard Debussy), Ligeti I think is the latest to have done this exercise at this level of music.
The complexity of writing is such as to escape almost everyone: using components of ethnomusicology, the building block derived from African music, Jazz, a mathematician crazy counterpoint, polyrhythm of , experiments, such as the attempt to conjure up additional votes invalid.
But this convoluted intellectual construction is tempered a tactile approach the piano, Ligeti wanted the "real" studies, ie piano pieces. And a display of virtuosity also taken as an end in itself, driven by its own technical limitations: he wrote these pieces for the virtuoso that he dreamed of being.
What is clear, to hear the result was never in default of imagination of this composer. It does not seem to use tricks theoretical goal of his music, but as a means to achieve a poetic result.
In this edition of Volume 3, Sony Ligeti, Pierre-Laurent Aimard seems like in a trance, in symbiosis with the music he wants to show us all the beauties and subtleties, never as a teacher but as a true lover of this music.
Indispensable!
To be exact, it is only the first two books of studies, lack the third (with the exception of one study: White on white, which is the first record in 1995 This third book was being written.)
Musica Ricercata There is also a beautiful early piece by Ligeti.
