Ligeti: Sonata for Viola Solo

BIS present a chronological exploration of the music of György Ligeti.

The exploration begins with a brief piece for solo piano written when he was studying in Budapest and ends with his final compositions, also for solo piano.

The disc highlights a number of works which demonstrate the kaleidoscopic qualities of the composer – from the sense of humour displayed in the Six Bagatelles to the otherworldliness of Lux Aeterna (used by Stanley Kubrick in his film 2001 – A Space Odyssey), and the sheer mass of Volumina for organ.

The disc brings together some seminal Ligeti works in interpretations that were highly praised when originally released.

The great viola player Kim Kashkashian has long been one of the most outstanding protagonists of modern composition and this bold and subtle account of solo music by the great Hungarian composers György Kurtág and György Ligeti is a landmark recording. Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages (1989- in progress) in its 19 aphoristic sections is as demanding as Ligeti’s Sonata for viola (1991-94), but Kashkashian surmounts the very different challenges of the works, and points towards the qualities that unite these composers. As ever, she gets to the heart of the music, and unravels its secrets.

In his liner note, Wolfgang Sandner comments: “For twenty years Kim Kashkashian has devoted herself to Kurtág’s complex oeuvre for the viola and developed a remarkable rapport for the relation between compositional fabric and sonic nuance. In the thoughtful dramaturgical sequence of this recording, and in Kashkashian’s scrupulous reading, these Kurtág pieces, and the six movements of Ligeti’s Viola Sonata that follows them, seem like the work of a single visionary artist – conveyed in hidden signs and coded messages.”

Amongst her many notable albums for ECM New Series, Kashkashian has recorded Kurtág’s Movement for viola and orchestra (4654202) and also his Nine Pieces for Solo Viola, the early Jelek for viola, op 5, and the chamber work Hommage à R.Sch. (4379572). This is the ninth disc on the label devoted in whole or in part to Kurtág’s music.

Both Ligeti and Heppener belong to the generation born in the 1920s which formed the basis for the post-war avant-garde. Lux Aeterna, used by Stanley Kubrick in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, marked the installation of a new musical language. The later Sonata for solo viola simultaneously evokes the polyphony of the 14th century and certain varieties of ethnic music. Im Gestein, a cycle of lieder to poems by Paul Celan which won Heppener the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize in 1993, is here recorded for the first time. In 1990, Daniel Reuss, lately of the RIAS Kammerchor, and soon to take up the baton with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, became director of Cappella Amsterdam, which he turned into the full-time professional ensemble that is now one of the most sought-after in the Netherlands. His previous recording of works by Robert Heppener with the Nederlands Kammerchor received an Edison Award. Future recordings with Capella Amsterdam will include a disc of Sweelinck for harmonia mundi.

This recording allows French violist Geneviève Strosser to fully display her talents in a programme of singular works that she has nurtured for several years and has particularly appropriated to her qualities as an artist: warm sonorities, heightened sensitivity, great expressiveness… Many of the pieces on this disc, pieces on which she worked with the composers themselves, are world premiere recordings.