The Ligeti Project (5 CDs special price)

MARBECKS STAFF PICKS 2008 - REISSUE OF THE YEAR

"Voices and instruments are combined in a different way in Ligeti's "Clocks and Clouds" for 12 solo female voices and a reduced orchestra (5 flutes and 5 clarinets but few brass for example), perhaps his least well known major work. This is the first recording of it and it is nothing short of a revelation. The voices are wordless but use a "non-sense" text derived from the phonetic alphabet which sometimes sounds like a language and make an odd sort of "sense". With small microtonal inflections, dense 12-part canons and a general sense of uneasy suspension this shimmering, iridescent work hovers in the air and lingers in the memory. "Clocks and Clouds" comes coupled with a set of songs in Hungarian for mezzo-soprano and 4 percussionists of which number 6 "Keseredes" (Bittersweet) is a sad, beautiful invented "folk-song". The disc also features the 2 concertos for violin and cello in stunning definitive performances. Along with the volume of the Ligeti Project dedicated to the orchestral works this is the best introduction to Ligeti's soundworld. There is no other composer of the 20th or any other century with his individual mixture of poetic nonsense, black humour, terror (Ligeti only narrowly escaped extermination by the fascists in World War II and most of his family perished in Auschwitz) and a constantly surprising imagination."
- KEITH on Vol 3