Gyorgi Ligeti

* Etudes, Books I and II

Idil Biret, piano.
Naxos 8.555777 TT: 53:42

Ligeti wrote his etudes coming out of a crisis of style.  The crisis led
to his latest manner, not so aggressively avant-garde as before and more or
less tonal and rhythmically regular, even dance-like.  The Etudes reflect
Ligeti's interest in complex polyrhythms, extending even to the player-piano
works of Conlon Nancarrow.  Indeed, he conceived one of the etudes for the
mechanical instrument itself.  For me, the hallmarks of Ligeti as a composer
are his delicate poetic sensibility allied to his amazingly precise sonic
imagination.  Even in something as early as Lux aeterna, a half-step can
make all the difference in the world.

Idil Biret describes herself as a "disciple" of Wilhelm Kempff, and that to
me is the matter.  I never particularly cared for Kempff either, and these
readings do strike me as very Kempff-like: broad, rough, and a bit *lumpen*.
In her brief comments on her approach to the etudes, Biret talks about
following the composer's musical markings, rather than the timings.  I
certainly don't fault her for this decision, but it's exactly the music that
I miss in this collection of notes.  There's very little phrasing here,
especially in the slower, dreamier movements.  I listen in vain for the
precision and the poetry characteristic of the composer.  The playing
alternates between always-hard and always-shapeless.

Naxos, as ever, has a low price, but this time you get ONLY what the composer
put down on the page, rather than the music he imagined.  It's a rare miss
for the label, but a miss nevertheless.  Better to go with the Pierre-Laurent
Aimard recording on Sony 62308.

Steve Schwartz