Masterworks (CD) - CD

Details: Sony Classical proudly announces an uncommonly attractive new batch of reissues from the CBS/Sony and RCA Victor/BMG back catalogues. This latest installment of the popular series showcases the reissue of a path-breaking composer edition as well as recordings by some of the labels' greatest artists of the last half century. Included in this batch are nine albums dedicated to one of the indisputable geniuses of modern music. Sony Classical's landmark "Ligeti Edition", recorded under the great Hungarian composer's supervision and first released on single albums in 1996, will now be available internationally in a complete 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).