Another CD review!

I hardly feel worthy to review a disk featuring György Ligeti's Requiem. I've been an admirer of his since I was a teenager and his works are one of the reasons I'm an enthusiastic fan of modernist music. While the late Mr. Ligeti wasn't terribly well-known (composers are like that these days, especially radicals like him), the Requiem is something a lot of people have heard, courtesy its prominent inclusion in the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a fascinating work for orchestra, two choruses, and a soprano soloist, using his trademark mid-period (think mid-1960s) densely layered clouds of sound, dissonant harmonies and shifting, subtle counterpoint. Rather than seeming like an overwhelming amount of voices, the choruses are so deftly arranged that they only add to the remarkable harmonic richness of the work. While the work isn't exactly traditional, it uses the traditional structure of a requiem to a point (not all the sections are present); still, it's awfully hard to pick out the structure beyond the overall shape of what can only be called a soundscape. Somehow, the variations of thick and thin, dissonant and consonant, motion and calm make for a brilliant musical structure.

The disk also has the sensational Hamburg Concerto for Horn and Orchestra from the late 1990s. I think there are better works from Mr. Ligeti's late period, like the amazing Piano Concerto, but this one has a lot of respect from the experts and it deserves all of it. The soundscapes are gone, and the rhythms have become more focused and intricate, while the harmonies are less dense and create a sense of formal structure that's a sign of a composer who has mastered his craft. The confidence of the work is breathtaking, but surpassed by its beauty.

The disk is filled out by the Double Concerto for Flute and Oboe plus Ramifications for a string chamber group. Both are nice bonuses and you won't feel like you're wasting your time. The Requiem is performed by the legendary Berlin Philharmonic, a group that we sometimes forget can play anything when they get stuck recording Brahms for the eighteenth time. Reinbert de Leeuw conducts and the combination is felicitous, as he brings out all the sophistication in the venerable band. The other pieces are recorded using the ASKO Ensemble and the related Schoenberg Ensemble, both of Amsterdam. There's almost no drop in quality from the Berlin as de Leeuw leads these modernist ensembles, although one might wish for a little more rhythmic detail and vigor in the Hamburg Concerto.

Despite a very minor quibble or two, this is a tremendous recording featuring two essential works from a giant of the 20th Century. You shouldn't ask if you need to hear these works, you should only ask if you're ready for them. When you are, this is the disk to get. And please, stop listening to the Mozart Requiem. This is better.

10 out of 10.

CDs listened to today:

• Louis Armstrong: Volume IV, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines
• Lightning Bolt: Hypermagic Mountain
• Alban Berg: Wozzeck
• Crowded House: Together Alone
• Esa-Pekka Salonen: L.A. Variations
• Jacques Casterede: Sonatine