Ligeti: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 2

Featuring

Fredrik Ullén
György Ligeti

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Composer's Artistic Vision

Ligeti's music is known for its unique blend of avant-garde experiments and traditionalism, subjective expressivity, and mechanistic processes.

Composer Biography

György Ligeti, born in Transylvania (Romania) to Hungarian parents, left Hungary in 1956 shortly after the Soviet intervention.

Recording & Production

For the 'Three Pieces for Two Pianos,' the recording features a single pianist, Fredrik Ullén, who recorded each part separately while listening to the other, to achieve optimal uniformity and transparency.

Composition History

Ligeti's early pieces for piano four hands, composed between 1942 and 1950 while he was a student in Hungary, show strong influences from Béla Bartók and traditional Hungarian folk music.

Compositional Technique

Ligeti's 'Polyphonic Etude' from 1943 features four parts that repeat melodic motifs of different lengths in their own keys, creating an effect like connected, differently sized cog-wheels.

Performer Biography

Fredrik Ullén, the pianist on this recording, is also a researcher in neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, focusing on motor control.

Compositional Technique

In his 'Musica Ricercata,' Ligeti explored a 'Cartesian' method, starting with a single pitch in the first movement and gradually adding more pitches until all twelve chromatic notes are used in the final movement.