Ligeti: Violin and Piano Concertos, etc album review – As always, Faust's performance is perceptive and immaculate

The Guardian

6 days ago

The huge stylistic shift that György Ligeti's music underwent in the late 1970s and early 1980s was one of the most remarkable and unexpected changes of direction of any composer, perhaps only comparable with Stravinsky's shift into neoclassicism in the 1920s and his adoption of serial techniques in the 1950s. The language that Ligeti invented for himself, which invested tonality with a whole new set of relationships and incorporated elements from a variety of non-western musical traditions, was unveiled in his Horn Trio of 1982, but it was in the two major concertos that followed, for piano in 1988 and violin in 1993, that the full power of his new language was revealed.
Both are remarkable works, which seem utterly fresh and original, yet identifiably remain part of the concerto tradition. It's no surprise that the violin concerto particularly has been taken up by a number of soloists, or that Isabelle Faust should have wanted to add her reading to the series she has made for Harmonia Mundi. It is a typical Faust performance, perceptive, technically immaculate, and just a little on the cool side, and it's paired with an equally accomplished, if a little more mechanical, account of the piano work with Jean-Frédéric Neuburger as soloist. Neuburger also includes Ligeti's early, Bartókian Concert Românesc, while Faust leads performances of two of György Kurtág's Aus der Ferne sequence, as exquisite interludes.
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