A number of these piano rolls have already appeared on CD. As
part of the Sony György Ligeti Edition, volume 5 was dedicated
to Mechanical Music, and is still one of my favourite
Ligeti recordings. The barrel organ version of Hungarian
Rock makes it sound like a mad solo from Keith Emerson,
and other versions of Continuum and a barrel organ Musica
ricercata make SK 62310 a Ligeti must-have. A comparison
of the player piano recordings does however see the MDG disc
easily coming out on top. The ideal circumstances of that mad
week in Wuppertal in which this entire ongoing series of Player
Piano discs seems to have been made provide a richer and more
colourful piano sound against the more metallic and distant
Sony results. Continuum appears in its version for two
player pianos as with the Sony disc. The Drei Stücke für
zwei Pianos however do not appear on the Sony release.
Listeners accustomed to some of the glorious performances of
Ligeti’s piano
music may wonder as to the ‘why?’ of having some of his
Études arranged for player piano, and may feel stung
by the mechanical feel of the way the music is communicated.
The best way to approach this is to relax and accept these as
entirely different works to those played by human hands. Ligeti
was directly influenced by Conlon Nancarrow’s ‘unplayable’ works
for player piano, and while his highly demanding Études pour
Piano were always originally for human performance, he also
recognised the advantages of absolute clarity in the accurate
rendition of simultaneously differing tempi and highly complex
rhythms. Ligeti also toyed with un-playability in terms of extreme
speeds, added octaves and the employment of the entire keyboard.
What we have here is a kind of turbo Ligeti: a direct mind-link
to the composer’s imagination, and a set of ideal performances
of pieces which you know are just the way he imagined
them, with no interpretation of a soloist between him and you
the listener. For this reason I find these recordings sometimes
even more jaw-droppingly remarkable and emotionally moving than
with a pianist involved. Ligeti explores descending scales,
ostinato textures and driving rhythms, extended or delayed tonal
resolution. There are some delightfully funny moments, such
as the little jazz intermezzo in the Selbstporträt, the
lightness of touch in serious ‘limping’ rhythms in En Suspense
and equally in the almost impressionistic rippling of Entrelacs.
Tension and stress grow from a growling boogie on L’Escalier
du Diable which is a genuine musical tour de force, rivalling
Messiaen for sheer charged-up ecstatic energy. Just when you
thought it was safe to come from behind the sofa, A Coloana
fara sfârsit kicks in as an even more intense and
manic variant on similar ideas. White on White is s strange
oasis of calm until 3:43, when a rhythmic coda lifts us rudely
from reverie.
Continuum was originally composed for two manual harpsichord,
so transcribing it for two pianos was a logical solution to
the technical aspects of material which often inhabits the same
range on the keyboard. I do tend to prefer the harpsichord version,
simply because that dramatic shift about two thirds through
can be that much more effective when stops are shifted, rather
than the ‘same but louder’ effect on the pianos, but it still
remains a seminal work. The minimalism in Continuum also
emerges in the last two of the Drei Stücke. The effect
of the first, Monument, is a bit like the random ticking
of the metronomes in another Ligeti piece, the Poème
Symphonique, but with block chords rather than ticks. This
becomes a kind of ‘dripping’ of notes in the opening of Selbstporträt,
a typical Ligeti development of rhythmic relationships which
has the quality of a random swarm, but also an organic development
and sense of inevitability like the multiplication of bacteria
under a microscope. That almost incidental jazz moment at 3:05
is priceless.
The remaining works on this disc are, as so many of the works
in this series, the results of collaboration with player piano
expert Jürgen Hocker. Francis Bowdrey’s Canon 10/27/12/80
is a brief sketch of a work: a birthday greeting to Nancarrow
which keeps its happy little secret right to the end. Japanese
composer Kiyoshi Furukawa initially developed his 12 Formen
with computer, but with the player piano in mind as a final
expression the sense of developing ideas involving mathematical
formulas and algorithms, using the computer as ‘the field glass
of the concept’, each musical idea could be given its full potential.
There are some fascinating ideas here, and while the harmonic
language is less immediately appealing when compared to Ligeti
you do have the feeling of sparking creativity at work. Most
of the pieces are short, and I’m not entirely convinced many
of them couldn’t be realised on anything other than a player
piano. The mechanical instrument generates it own sense of timing
and surrealist musical relationships however, and if you key
in any of these Formen randomly their immediacy and range
of qualities is unmistakable.
From a set of miniatures to a single work which is I think one
of the longest player piano movements I know. Gerhard Stäbler’s
playmanic came about after a meeting with Conlon Nancarrow
and is intended as both a homage to the man and his music. The
piece “organises areas of the keyboard, lays them out as Bach
did in his solo works for violin and cello, ‘devours’ them and
‘goes straight through’ them in sometimes extremely fast motions,
sometimes in motions that are extremely slow (and fanned out
in fine detail again).” This description from the booklet is
not only fair, but is also in some ways a reflection of the
confusions and contradictions I feel from this piece. Some moments
work remarkably well – the mysterious ‘right hand’ echo gestures
for instance, but Stäbler seems determined to repeat banal ideas
ad nauseam, and as a result the piece sounds too long
even before you are halfway through. I can almost predict the
moment at which various types of listeners will switch the thing
off in exasperation. On a good day I might last until being
finally hacked off entirely by the tremulos at about 12 minutes
in, but beyond a sense of reviewer’s duty I doubt in fact that
I shall want to play this piece again.
As part of MDG’s excellent series of player piano works, this
is an essential volume. Ligeti’s music is fascinating in any
medium, but his unique rhythmic eccentricity and satisfying
harmonic and textural imagination work exceptionally well on
player piano. Comparing his work and some of the other material
on the disc starkly shows how it is possible to go from the
sublime to the bloomin’ awful through exactly the same medium.
Vive la difference, but even if Keith Jarrett came on
stage and improvised an accurate Homage à playmanic I
suspect he would stand a good chance of being booed off. Baggy
old tedium aside, the rest of this disc is at the very least
intriguing, and is at its best the best you will ever hear of
20th century player piano.
Dominy Clements
Jürgen Hocker (Bösendorfer Grand Piano with Ampico Player Piano
Mechanism (1927); Fischer Grand Piano with Ampico Player Piano Mechanism
(1925)) 
