In the year of his 80th birthday, these are glorious accounts of great 20th-century works. (The Guardian on Volume IV of the Teldec Ligeti Project) This is the fifth and final recording on the Teldec label completing a project begun by Sony to record Gyrgy Ligetis complete oeuvre. The artists for these works were hand-picked by Ligeti, who took an active part in the recording process. Ligeti comments on the works in this recording: While I was still a student at the Budapest Music Academy in 1949, I was requested by public radio to cultivate the national heritage by writing a suite on dance melodies of the Biedermeier period, that is, around 1800. The Old Hungarian Ballroom Dances (1949) are therefore not my own composition, but a selection of dance tunes by Lavotta, Bihari, Csermk and Rzsavlgyi, which I orchestrated for flute, clarinet and strings. The same year I wrote some incidental music for a Chinese puppet play. The Big Turtle Fanfare is a melodic fragment from this music. After a lengthy stay in Romania in 1950, I wrote Balada si joc (Ballade and Dance) first for two violins, then for school orchestra. I later developed the Romanian Concerto (1951) from this piece. The authorities allowed the Cello Sonata (first movement 1948, second movement 1953) to be recorded for public radio; it could not be performed in concert because of its formalistic second movement. The 11 piano pieces Musica Ricercata (1951-53) were banned. Later, when I was living in the West, the Paris-based accordionist Max Bonnay transcribed some of these pieces for bayan (a type of Russian accordion). I decided to flee from Hungary after the bloody suppression of the uprising of October 1956. With my wife Vera, I illegally crossed the border into Austria on foot during the night of 11 December 1956. My first western composition Artikulation (1958) was realised in the Cologne Studio for Electronic Music (the originally quadraphonic work is presented here in a stereo version)
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