Ligeti Musica Ricercata and Works for Piano

Three composers, three countries, three very different relationships with official silence — and one pianist willing to make the case that all of it belongs together on a single disc. It’s an intriguing proposition, not entirely convincing, but worth the argument.

Start with Ligeti. The twelve pieces of Musica Ricercata — the title suggests music that has been searched out, or perhaps researched, though the booklet doesn’t bother to explain this — were written in Budapest in the early 1950s, when their composer was effectively sealed off from the Western avant-garde by the realities of Soviet cultural policy. He couldn’t hear Messiaen, couldn’t hear the Darmstadt generation taking a blowtorch to the postwar musical landscape. What he could hear was Bartók, and the debt is audible throughout: those dry, percussive attacks, the modal inflections, the rhythmic asymmetries that feel folky without ever being folksy. Yet there’s something else happening too. Each piece restricts itself to a limited number of pitch classes — the first uses only two, A and D, hammered in every register until the final bar produces a single C like a key turning in a lock — and the cumulative effect is of a composer teaching himself, in secret, how to think chromatically without capitulating to Schoenbergian orthodoxy. Ligeti was too smart, and too stubborn, to simply adopt someone else’s system. These pieces weren’t performed until 1969, by which point he had long since left Hungary and written the Atmosphères and Lux aeterna that would make him famous — or anyway, make him the composer Stanley Kubrick called. Heard now, Musica Ricercata feels less like juvenilia than like a private notebook: the thinking is already precise, the wit already dry.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s Musical Toys occupy different territory entirely.

Written for her daughter, these miniatures wear their purposes lightly — descriptive titles, modest dimensions, an apparent innocence that the cultural commissars presumably found unthreatening. They were right, in the most superficial sense. But the pianist who plays through them quickly discovers that “apparent innocence” is doing a lot of work. The writing presupposes a fully formed mastery, and pieces like “The Woodpecker” — that insistent, slightly manic repeated figure — or the luminous modal simplicity of “Song of the Fisherman” suggest a composer who has understood something Schumann understood about the Kinderszenen: that music ostensibly for children is music that has decided, deliberately, to remember. Gubaidulina’s path in Soviet Russia was harder and longer than Ligeti’s in Hungary. The authorities didn’t suppress her so much as render her invisible for decades. These pieces are small, but they are not minor.

Then there is Unsuk Chin, and here the disc runs into trouble.

Her piano études are the most technically demanding works here — formidable, in fact — and she studied with Ligeti, which you might expect to leave fingerprints. Mostly it doesn’t. What she’s after is a continuation of the virtuoso étude tradition running from Liszt through Debussy and Ligeti’s own studies, updated for a musical language that sometimes suggests Boulez or late Cage without quite committing to either. The textures are genuinely inventive in places: there are moments where the piano seems to be generating overtones from within itself, harmonics blooming from the strings like something organic. But the études have a tendency to sustain interest as problems — as demonstrations of what a pianist and a composer can do together — without quite becoming experiences. You admire them. You don’t lean forward.

That’s the honest verdict on the disc as a whole, really: two-thirds of it rewards close listening, and one third rewards close analysis. The Ligeti and Gubaidulina pieces are the reason to own it. The Chin études are the reason to respect the pianist’s ambition — even while wishing that ambition had found slightly more grateful material to inhabit.