Track Listings (15) - Disc #1| All Artists: Ligeti, Biret Title: Ligeti: Etudes, Books I & II / Biret Members Wishing: 1 Total Copies: 0 Label: Naxos Release Date: 3/18/2003 Genre: Classical Styles: Chamber Music, Historical Periods, Classical (c.1770-1830) Number of Discs: 1 SwapaCD Credits: 1 UPC: 747313577729 |
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Search - Ligeti, Biret :: Ligeti: Etudes, Books I & II / Biret
 | Ligeti, Biret Ligeti: Etudes, Books I & II / Biret Genre: Classical
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CD ReviewsA Major Disappointment J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 04/19/2003 (2 out of 5 stars) "It pains me to write the following. I had waited in eager anticipation for this release. I have loved the recording of the Études that Pierre-Laurent Aimard made for the Ligeti Edition but wanted to hear another pianist's take on these towering masterpieces of late 20th-century piano music. I thought 'who better than Idil Biret?' After all, she is a real virtuoso and in her playing of Romantic masters, like Chopin, she has shown that she can make poetry of music. Alas, this was not to be. In what I can only read as a self-serving note in the enclosed booklet, Biret indicates that she slows down some of the études, explaining that composers often don't really know whether their music can be played as written. And so she decided she would follow the 'musical markings' rather than the specified timings supplied by Ligeti. It certainly appears to me that Aimard manages the markings quite nicely and at the required tempi. Further, he does so with a far more poetic management of dynamics, tempi and phrasing. Indeed, HE is the one who plays this modern masterpiece as if it were Chopin. The sound of her piano doesn't help Biret; it is somewhat harsh. But, more than that, much of her playing sounds like she is just managing the notes, not the music within them. I can only assume that her interpretations were not settled enough to record them. Although it is hard to conceive of such difficult pieces being sight-read straight through, her playing is rough and ready enough to suggest little more than that. I am convinced that with more study she could have done a much more nuanced job of it. She's a fine musician and a wonderful pianist. Maybe she'll have another chance to record them in the future. Meanwhile, these simply won't do. I would strongly urge a buyer to look for the Aimard version (also available here at amazon.com); it contains more music (the 'Musica ricercata' and part of Book III) and only costs a little more. (I have not had the opportunity to hear the recordings of two other pianists, Lucille Chung [doing Book II] or Fredrik Ullén [I & II].)Scott Morrison" Not competitive scarecrow | 01/04/2004 (2 out of 5 stars) "I listened to this recording of the Ligeti Etudes many times, and enjoyed it a lot, but the more I became accustomed to the unique sound, the more I felt that something was missing. For example, the first etude, which others have highly praised, was disappointing. The 13th seemed to lose intensity in the middle, almost as though the pianist started with an unsustainable tempo. So eventually I found and bought the Aimard recording (only a few dollars more) and it was a revelation--vastly more artistic and virtuosic than this one. Actually I enjoy this CD more now, as an example of how the same piece can be played so differently by different pianists. But for a first CD of this great music, the Biret is not the CD to get." An awful performance of a sublime set of piano pieces Christopher Culver | 09/28/2004 (1 out of 5 stars) "Gyorgy Ligeti's "Piano Etudes", with two books completed and one in progress, are some of contemporary music's most outstanding works for piano. Ligeti began the work in the early 1980's as part of a wholesale evaluation of his compositional technique. Gone is the micropolyphony of his earlier pieces, but in its place Ligeti displays a number of ingenious new musical avenues, with two major inspirations. The first is chaos theory and fractal mathematics, and the second is African polyphony. What makes the Etudes particularly fascinating is that some of them are meant to be too fast for any human pianist, and their definitive versions are for player piano. For some of these player piano renditions one should seek out "Gyorgy Ligeti Edition 5: Mechanical Music". Ligeti's favourite merely human pianist is Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who gives a must-have performance of the first two books on "Gyorgy Ligeti Edition 3: Works for Piano".
Unfortunately, on this disc Idil Biret gives a very poor performance. She decides to ignore the given tempo and play slowly by only by the musical markings. This is a silly decision, showing that she prepared this recording with little study of the material or forethought. Biret just ignores what Ligeti intended and plays painfully slowly. She also plays rather heavily, and doesn't have the nimbleness of other pianists who have tackled the work. This collection is unusual among human performances in that it contains Etude 14a, "Coloana fara sfarsit" which Ligeti premiered as a player piano performance on "Gyorgy Ligeti Edition 5: Mechanical Music". It is, in fact, the original fourteenth etude, but when even Aimard begged Ligeti for something a human could approach, Ligeti substituted "Coloana Infinita" instead. Biret should have known that this piece is simply too fast for a mere mortal, and her performance of it is incredibly ugly. The liner notes give a brief description of each piece of the Etudes, and Biret's own apology for her method of approaching it all. However, everything is rather spare, as is usual with a Naxos disc, and Romanian words are annoyingly typeset incorrectly. I would recommend getting the performance by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Ligeti's favourite pianist, on "Gyorgy Ligeti Edition 3: Works for Piano". That recording has the benefit of being supervised by Ligeti himself and so can be slightly definitive. While Biret's renditions here have the affordability of a Naxos disc, she gives a flawed performance that should be avoided." |