Masterworks

Sony Classical's landmark "Ligeti Edition", recorded under the great Hungarian composer's supervision and first released on single CDs in 1996, will now be available internationally in a boxed set. This famous project needs little additional commentary. Fanfare called it "a must for any collector or interested listener". Enough to say that it features such authoritative interpreters of the composer's endlessly fascinating works as Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing the staggeringly difficult and beautiful Études and other piano works, the Arditti Quartet giving benchmark readings of the String Quartets and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the orchestral works and the definitive recording of Ligeti's operatic masterpiece Le Grand Macabre, which Gramophone called "the key opera of the end of the twentieth century". Salonen's ideally cast recording of the final revised version, sung in English, "is the one to have - Ligeti's revisions are all improvements, and the performance is a fine one" (Gramophone).