Percussion Ensemble Project

Track Listings

1. "Periphery" (Mick Rossi, composer/conductor)

2. "Purple Mountains" (Davis/Feder)

3. "Holos-Gramma/Torso" (Mick Rossi)

4. "Lapidary Nimbus" (Harold Oliver)

5. "Temples, Evening, Wind and Metal" (C. Descarfino)

6. "TV Themes" (Denis DiBlasio)

7. "Ionisation" (Edgard Varese)

Editorial Reviews
Percussive Notes
"Witten should be commended for recording this CD without any editing. The energized sounds and accuracy are apparent."

Album Description
Special guests Michael Davis (trombone), Mariko Smiley (violin), Dr. Harold Oliver (haiku reader) and Dr. Robert Rawlins (flute) join director Dean Witten in a program of works ranging from our own Denis DiBlasio to Edgard Varese.

Percussion Ensemble Project, Music, Mick Rossi , Michael Davis , Mariko Smiley , Robert Rawlins Dean Witten , Rowan University Percussion Ensemble, Various, Dean Witten

The Ligeti Project III: Cello Concerto / Clocks & Clouds / Violin Concerto / Síppal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel
Average customer rating:

Thank you for all, Mr. Ligeti.

Deep contrasts and consistencies among four masterful pieces

A great Ligeti disc, including two world premieres

More serious fun from Ligeti

two string concertos, two vocal works

The Ligeti Project III: Cello Concerto / Clocks & Clouds / Violin Concerto / Síppal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel
Gyorgy Ligeti , Siegfried Palm , Frank Peter Zimmerman , ASKO/Schonberg Ensemble , Capella Amsterdam , and Amadinda Percussion Group
Manufacturer: Teldec
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Ligeti, György | ( L ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music
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Violin | Strings | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music
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Choruses | Vocal Non-Opera | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music
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The Ligeti Project IV: Hamburg Concerto (Horn Concerto) / Double Concerto / Ramifications / Requiem

The Ligeti Project II: Lontano / Atmosphères / Apparitions / San Francisco Polyphony / Concert Românesc - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Jonathan Nott

The Ligeti Project I: Melodien / Chamber Concerto / Piano Concerto / Mysteries of the Macabre - Schönberg Ensemble / ASKO Ensemble / Reinbert de Leeuw

The Ligeti Project, Vol. 5

György Ligeti Edition 1: String Quartets and Duets - Arditti String Quartet

ASIN: B00006F1P9
Release Date: 2003-01-28

Customer Reviews:

Thank you for all, Mr. Ligeti........2006-06-14

It's not easy to write about Ligeti today, he has just passed away last Monday, so this is the first review I write about his works with Ligeti death... We know it could happen because of his very weak health, but it hurts when finally it's confirmed that he is not with us... We have his works and that's the most direct way to the immortality, that one Ligeti is living now in our memory and in our ears, those that were filled so many times with his extraordinary music, one of the best I know in the XXth Century, that finally will be Ligeti's century, as his work is quite complete written in that period.

Teldec continued some years ago Sony series of Ligeti music, a break that didn't suffer too much of that change, adding enormous artists like those you can listen in this CD. All the series is an outstanding thing, an some performances are really the best.

Cello Concert is my favourite Ligeti's concerto together with the Chamber one. A work in the style of his marvellous orchestral works of the `60s that explores the cello resources in an unique way. Palms' performance is very good, but he is not in so good shape like in the years of the premiere, and in general terms nowadays I prefer Queyras performance with Boulez for DG, really the version of Ligeti's Cello Concerto I think it's the best available. The ensemble playing is really amazing, one of the best I know on CD, and you have to think there're very good performances, like Boulez's one or the one played by Miklos Perenyi & Ensemble Modern, conducted by Peter Eötvös (Sony), my third version after Boulez and this one.

Clocks and Clouds, for voices and ensemble, is an interesting work that explore natural rhythms and mechanical ones, transforming them. This is the world premiere recording, I can't believe it, because it's really a very good work, sometimes in quite minimal style, working with elemental cells.

Violin concert is the typical example from Ligeti's final period, much more focused on rhythm and colour, and less explorative than his previous periods I really liked much more. This performance by Frank Peter Zimmermann is the best I know, better than Sashko Gawriloff one with Boulez and the EIC (DG), which is really very good too. I talked with Zimmermann about this recording some months ago, and he agreed to this is a marvellous recording and CD, with Ligeti help.

Sippal, dobbal, nádihegeduvel is a piece I didn't know and which I find very interesting too. Even the piece I really consider the best one in this CD is Cello Concert.

The sound is simply perfect in every piece, in the very high level Teldec is recording the full series. Warm sound, compact, clear, clean and very well balanced and direct. A natural sound in which the works seems even better.

Great CD in an outstanding project.

Deep contrasts and consistencies among four masterful pieces.......2004-11-04

This is the third disc in Teldec's "Ligeti Project", which continues the collection started by Sony's "Gyorgy Ligeti Edition" of the composer's works in performances supervised by the composer himself. It contains four works, including two world premiers, and represents works from the 1960's and the 1990's. As with most of the material in the "Ligeti Project" series, the orchestras are the Asko and Schoenberg Ensembles conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw.

The "Cello Concerto" was premiered in Berlin with Siegfriend Palm on cello in 1967, and Palm, one of the most famous interpreters of the avant garde cello over the last forty years, returns on this performance. In spite of its name, however, the work is not a traditional concerto, for the soloist does not dominate to the expected degree and only his visual presence marks his role. The piece begins with a long-held E, marked "pppppppp", the softest dynamic in Ligeti's entire oeuvre, which continues for a minute and a half before it meets F. This gradual evolution continues for the five-plus minutes of the first movement, opening up the harmonic cluster in both directions like an elegant vista. The second movement is in a way Ligeti's embrace of pre-serialist norms, for he uses open octaves and tritones, but its series of gestural mannerisms and wild gesticulations keeps it firmly in the modern tradition. This is not one of his most famous works of the 60's, but still deserving of attention.

"Clocks and Clouds", inspired by a lecture by Karl Popper on the distinction between mechanical regularity and fuzzy nebulosity, is a piece for 12 female voices and orchestra written in 1973 but never before recorded. It uses a remarkable selection of instruments containing seventeen woodwinds, but only two trumpets and no other brass, no violins among the strings, and glockenspiel, vibraphone, celestra, and two harps in important roles. The sung text is merely phonetic symols meant to blend with the instrumental sonorities. This is an ethereal, lush, and dreamlike piece that is among Ligeti's most easily listenable, and stylistically it shows inspiration from the school of minimalism which Ligeti became acquainted with during a term teaching in San Francisco.

The "Violin Concerto" (1989-1992) was written between 1989 and 1993 by comission of the violinist Saschko Gawriloff. Here the soloist is Frank-Peter Zimmermann. The work is a carnival of microtones. The orchestra consists of ten wind players, percussion, and eleven solo strings, and tuning varies wildly. Brass players often play natural harmonics that clash with equal temperment, two string players retune their instruments to follow the seemingly out-of-tune sounds of the double-bass, and several players turn to imprecise ocarinas and slide whistles. Like many works of the late Ligeti, this is in a postmodern vein, where the composer not only showcases his own new ideas but quotes his own past works ("Musica Ricercata") and borrows from Balkan folk music concepts. I concur with those who would call this music "wacky", it's certainly exhuberant and hops from style to style in a very fun way.

"Sippal, Dobbal, Nadihegeduvel" is a circle of seven songs based on poems by Sandor Weores, among the greatest of 20th century Hungarian poets whose works Ligeti and fellow Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos have extensively set. The work uses only mezzo-soprano and percussion, and was written for the Amadinda Percussion Group who also perform it here. It is in some ways a return to the faux folk music Ligeti wrote in communist Hungary, using only convential tunings but it nevertheless has a very exotic and non-traditional sound through its uses of metallophone percussion. I enjoy these songs because I am a great fan of Weores' poetry, but they are quite different than most of Ligeti's adult works and may meet many listeners with bafflement. What one must understand before hearing these seven pieces is that Ligeti has a sense of humour just like all people and is not some deadly serious ivory tower academic composer like, say, Boulez.

While perhaps not the best introduction to Ligeti (try "Gyorgy Ligeti Edition 3: Piano Works" or "The Ligeti Project IV") This is one of the strongest discs in his collected works and passionately recommended.

A great Ligeti disc, including two world premieres.......2003-11-21

This, the third entry in Teldec's Ligeti Project, is sensibly balanced in terms of its coverage of Ligeti's output. Two of the four works are vocal, two are concerti. Two are from his 'clocks and clouds' micropolyphonic phase, two are from his recent postmodern one. And all are given superlative performances.

The cello concerto of 1966 was perhaps the decisive work in Ligeti's first mature period, as it is the piece in which he begins to return to conventionally beautiful harmonic writing. The first of the two movements of the cello concerto is very slow, beginning with a single cello note initially marked pppppp (!), which slowly becomes louder until it is joined by other instruments which start to fill in the notes above and below it. Eventually, the notes in the center of the pitch range fall away, and the cello sails as high as it can reach over a single held bass note, 'alone and lost' as the composer puts it. In contrast, the second movement covers a similar process in a much more hyperactive manner, ending with the soloist sputtering out percussive raps and jerky notes. The performance here, by the dedicatee of the work, Siegfried Palm, outclasses both his earlier recording and that by Jean-Guihen Queyras on DG, and can be considered definitive.

Clocks and Clouds, for small chorus and chamber orchestra, is 30 years old now, but previously unrecorded. The title, taken from an essay by Karl Popper on the difference between discrete and continuous phenomena, is a very good description of the work, which contrasts rhythmic, mechanical repetition with near-static, slowly shifting harmonies. Ligeti himself was very critical of this work, believing it was too derivative of American minimalists like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, but it sounds like pure Ligeti to me. The orchestration is limpid and clear, with some superb writing for tuned percussion, and the choral writing is a model of clarity.

1992's violin concerto is a paragon of later Ligeti--its Bartokian inheritance twisted by an interest in clashing tunings and impure intonation. Its five movements (fast-slow-fast-slow-fast in Bartokian arch form) provide much contrast--the first movement emerging out of repeated ostinato figures into melody, the second varying a folk-like theme (with the harmonies 'bent' by slide whistles and ocarinas). A brief, rapid intermezzo, coloured by a haze of harmonic clashes, forms the third movement, before an intense passacaglia, slow passacaglia that climaxes in dissonant, harmonically clashing notes. The virtuoso finale climaxes with a cadenza--the violinist is invited to supply his or her own, though here Frank Peter Zimmermann uses the one written by the work's dedicatee Sashko Gawriloff--before the orchestra rudely ends the work with a brief series of chords. This is by any standards a major work, and Zimmermann's performance should be considered the most desirable on record at this point.

The final work, With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles is a song cycle for soprano and percussion quartet, based on poetry by Sandor Weores. The seven songs here are brief, and the accompaniment often tends towards bizarre sound effects, but it is still a strong work. The first song rumbles away splendidly: "A mountain walks/The other mountain comes towards it", as the words have it. The second song is a rapid nonsense poem with delighted squeaks and squeals from the percussionists: in contrast, the third is merely a sequence of peaceful diatonic chords. The fourth song evokes mindless labour, the aggression that is beneath the surface eventually coming to the surface near the end. Two slow songs follow, the fifth a melancholic, ruminative piece where the vocalist is accompanied by four harmonicas, the sixth a near-folk-pop slice of melancholy, and the whole work is rounded off by a deliciously over-the-top nonsense song.

This might well be the best single Ligeti disc available today. Even by Ligeti's impressive standard, the works are consistently fine, and the performances here are all outstanding.

More serious fun from Ligeti.......2003-03-18

Serious composers probably take umbrage at the notion that their works sound "whacky," but that's the best adjective I can think of for Ligeti's exuberant compositions. This series (and its earlier incarnation on Sony) has brought us some really out-there stuff from one of the most individual composers of the 20th century. This latest release has the beautiful but quirky Violin Concerto, a kind of cuckoo-land successor to the Bartok 2nd concerto. There's also a piece for voices and orchestra from the '60s that's more in the serious vein. Not so the cycle for voice and percussion at the end of the CD, where the singer screams, yelps, and makes all manner of crazy sounds, all of it to more dramatically convey the text. Compared to many Europeans of his generations, Ligeti has always had a sense of humor (dark at times, but never the less). This latest release is a delight, and the performances are exquisite.

two string concertos, two vocal works.......2003-03-02

This, the third in the LIGETI PROJECT series, features new recordings of the Cello Concerto and the Violin Concerto, along with premieres of two vocal works, "Clocks and Clouds" from 1973, and a new work, "With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles" from 2000.

Siegfried Palm plays the cello, as he did in the original recording of the Concerto in 1967 (Wergo 60613-50). This is a fine version, but it's not clear that it surpasses the original. The recording quality, with state-of-the-art compression, is creamier, yet murkier than the more natural 1967 version. I have not heard the DG recording with Queyras, and Boulez conducting. "Clocks and Clouds" is a superb piece, one of the last in Ligeti's characteristic style of the 1960s -- with both vocals and orchestra, it could be a hybrid of "Atmospheres" and "Lux Aeterna." The Violin Concerto has been hailed as one of Ligeti's finest later works, and Frank Peter Zimmerman gives it a spectacular performance. Again, I have not heard the original DG recording with Gawriloff and Boulez to compare, but in its own right this long-awaited recording is outstanding. Finally, "Sippal, dobbal, nadihegeduvel: Weores Sandor verseire" is a collage of seven short vocal pieces, setting verse by the Hungarian poet to song. Katalin Karolyi is the mezzo-soprano, with idiosyncratic accompaniment by such instruments as slide whistles and harmonicas.

Another fine collection of Ligeti! For anyone first investigating Ligeti's soundworld, I would recommend beginning with the LIGETI PROJECT II, which includes some of his most well-known and influential orchestral works brilliiantly played by the Berlin Philharmonic. This disc is essential for collectors because of the otherwise unavailable vocal work premieres, and will give anyone a great introduction to a 20th century master.

See my GYORGY LIGETI'S SOUNDWORLD, as well as my THE 7 BEST COMPOSERS OF THE LATE 20TH CENTURY lists for more Ligeti recordings and reviews.

Average customer rating:

Percussion Ensemble Project

ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

Classical | Indie Music | Stores | Music

General | Classical | Styles | Music
ASIN: B0000560MB
Release Date: 1998-09-07

Tracks:

"Periphery" (Mick Rossi, composer/conductor)
"Purple Mountains" (Davis/Feder)
"Holos-Gramma/Torso" (Mick Rossi)
"Lapidary Nimbus" (Harold Oliver)
"Temples, Evening, Wind and Metal" (C. Descarfino)
"TV Themes" (Denis DiBlasio)
"Ionisation" (Edgard Varese)

Album Description

Special guests Michael Davis (trombone), Mariko Smiley (violin), Dr. Harold Oliver (haiku reader) and Dr. Robert Rawlins (flute) join director Dean Witten in a program of works ranging from our own Denis DiBlasio to Edgard Varese.

Track Listings:

Track Listings

track listings

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Thanks

1. "Periphery" (Mick Rossi, composer/conductor)
2. "Purple Mountains" (Davis/Feder)
3. "Holos-Gramma/Torso" (Mick Rossi)
4. "Lapidary Nimbus" (Harold Oliver)
5. "Temples, Evening, Wind and Metal" (C. Descarfino)
6. "TV Themes" (Denis DiBlasio)
7. "Ionisation" (Edgard Varese)