For the last decade or so Gyorgy Ligeti’s Etudes pour piano have been a hot ticket on the piano competition circuit. Of course, as is the case with most etudes, technically brilliant performances far outnumber musically invested ones. In her performance of ten of these etudes on a recital at Greenwich House Music School pianist Jenny Lin brought out the individual musical qualities of each etude wonderfully. Ms. Lin handled the more mechanistic etudes (such as No. 1 “Desorde”) with technical confidence and clarity but it was in the more expressive etudes (such as No. 16 “Pour Irina”) that she showed her musical commitment to this music.
In prefatory comments to her performance, Ms. Lin noted that when she got to visit Mr. Ligeti she noted stacks of piano music on his piano. He studied most of the standard etude literature both with the intent of learning about the genre and of figuring out how he could contribute to it in a meaningful way. She noted that the etudes often surpass other etudes such as those of Chopin and Liszt in technical difficulty and that a technically perfect performance could not really be achieved, especially if musical elements beyond the technical were to be explored. At a post-recital reception, Ms. Lin related to me that Mr. Ligeti often reveals an almost sadistic humor by taking even seemingly simple passages and tweaking them so that they become much more difficult. She also noted that studying these etudes has had the effect of both making some things easier and some things more difficult due to the way the performer must use her fingers (unlike Chopin, for example). Ligeti’s famous use of polyryhthms are frequently in evidence and the influences of Bartok and Messiaen can be noted.
Ms. Lin began her recital with Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata, which was composed near the beginning of his career as he searched (ricercare) for an individual voice. Before performing this work, Ms. Lin noted that with each of the eleven works in the set Ligeti adds a pitch class so that the first work uses only one note (with a second note at the very end) and the final piece uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. The second work was used in the film Eyes Wide Shut which, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, helped bring Ligeti’s music, if not his name, before a wider public. Although he was searching for his individual voice at this time, the music of eastern Europe and, in particular, the music of Bartok is never far away.
In a rather unusual move, Ms. Lin performed Ligeti’s Continuum for harpsichord. In pre-performance comments she noted that she was not a harpsichordist (although her performance showed great sensitivity to the instrument). She also noted that Ligeti composed the work for a German Neupert harpsichord, one that has a big sound and also five pedals for registration changes. She performed on a French harpsichord that was lighter and required the performer to change registrations manually. Because of this factor, she needed to make some discrete adjustments to the music and also create sounds that were not intended by Ligeti. With this perpetual motion piece Ms. Lin’s voicing and changes of registration were spot on and even the rhythmic “thumping” at the end, though not intended by Mr. Ligeti, was completely in the spirit of the work. The mechanistic qualities of the work anticipated those found in many of the etudes she would perform to conclude the program.
With performers such as Ms. Lin, Ligeti’s musical legacy as well as his technical demands are literally in good hands.
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