Ligeti Sony

These chamber works bring Sony's adventurous, timely Ligeti series to a natural pinnacle. Long the challenger of stylistic stasis and customary demonstrations of excellence, Ligeti has outdone himself here (as he did with the fantastic Mechanical Music release). The Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (1982) challenges its players to stay in step with each other even while expanding virtuosity to the breaking point. Marie-Luise Neunecker plays such full horn parts that they roll flow over the tonal bounds, as does Saschko Gawriloff's violin and Pierre-Laurent Aimard's piano… –Andrew Bartlett..

These chamber works bring Sony's adventurous, timely Ligeti series to a natural pinnacle. Long the challenger of stylistic stasis and customary demonstrations of excellence, Ligeti has outdone himself here (as he did with the fantastic Mechanical Music release). The Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (1982) challenges its players to stay in step with each other even while expanding virtuosity to the breaking point. Marie-Luise Neunecker plays such full horn parts that they roll flow over the tonal bounds, as does Saschko Gawriloff's violin and Pierre-Laurent Aimard's piano… –Andrew Bartlett..

This is a fine collection of moving, muscular performances by this seminal postwar composer. Surely the best known of the works on this disc is the Second String Quartet, one of the masterpieces of 20th-century music–although you might not know it's a masterpiece until the heartbreaking last movement. But the First String Quartet, written before Ligeti emigrated from Hungary to the West, is fascinating: it shows Ligeti working through the influence of Bartók, particularly Bartók's Third and Fourth Quartets–music Ligeti knew only silently, from the score, since performances of Bartók's music were banned by the Hungarian communist regime.

György Sándor Ligeti was a Hungarian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde composers in the latter half of the twentieth century" and "one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time".

Pianist Khatia Buniatishvili specialized mostly in virtuoso repertory in the early years of her tenure with the Sony Classical label, but she goes in a different direction with Labyrinth, a collection of mostly slow, reflective pieces from various periods and in various styles. The labyrinth involved might be a winding path through musical styles or through an individual soul. The program is of the sort that one shouldn't try to hard to pin down; Buniatishvili posted on social media (October 9, 2020) that "the voice you hear is the voice of a human being – my voice, your voice," but it's quite evocative.

Pianist Khatia Buniatishvili specialized mostly in virtuoso repertory in the early years of her tenure with the Sony Classical label, but she goes in a different direction with Labyrinth, a collection of mostly slow, reflective pieces from various periods and in various styles. The labyrinth involved might be a winding path through musical styles or through an individual soul. The program is of the sort that one shouldn't try to hard to pin down; Buniatishvili posted on social media (October 9, 2020) that "the voice you hear is the voice of a human being – my voice, your voice," but it's quite evocative.