The fact that Sony dared to record the work of György Ligeti in its entirety at the time is remarkable, because this music belongs to the kind on which money must be invested. However, The Ligeti Project became possible thanks to Swiss patron Vincent Meyer, to whom the series was dedicated. So the resources were there, but nevertheless the cooperation with Sony went wrong. Conductor Esa Pekka
… Salonen got the nerves of the Master's presence at the recording recessions. The project then ended up at Teldec, after which Ligeti-resistant conductors such as Jonathan Nott and Reinbert de Leeuw were approached to take over the role of Salonen (source: NRC Handelsblad). The third part of The Ligeti Project by Teldec (with the Asko / Schönberg Ensemble conducted by De Leeuw) shows clearly the development Ligeti has gone through over the years. The Cello Concerto from 1966 shows a relationship with static scores such as Atmosphères, Lontano and the Requiem. Light and exciting is the beautiful Violin Concerto from 1992, in which the transparent texture is beautifully colored by the soft sounds of a number of ocarinas. In a playful way, Ligeti avoids the snares of neo-romanticism, because any form of 'O Mensch' pathetics is completely foreign to him. Ligeti's love for onomatopoietic nonsense poems is again expressed in the song cycle Sippal, Dobbal, Nadihegeduvel (with flutes, drums and fiddles) written in 2000. The cycle also contains 'ordinary' poems. Like the first, in which a group of wolves threatens to get stuck between two advancing mountains. "Don't crush us," the wolves howl in fear. "We don't care, because we are mountains," the mountains answer with Transylvanian disdain. And the wolves can do it with that. (HJ)more