György Ligeti left only three works for organ, Volumina, Harmonies and Coulée, and together they changed what the instrument could do in new music. Here they are played by Dominik Susteck on the organ of the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne, alongside his own arrangement of the piano cycle Musica ricercata and a set of his own improvisations. The disc was placed on the quarterly list of the German Record Critics' Award (3/2013).
Ligeti (1923-2006) was a Hungarian composer. Susteck, an organist and composer, recorded the programme in co-production with Deutschlandradio. Ingo Dorfmüller wrote the liner notes. The Sankt Peter organ, built with stops specifically for new music, suits works that treat the instrument as a source of sound masses rather than lines. Born in Bochum in 1977, Susteck studied church music, composition and organ in Essen, Cologne and Saarbrücken, with Nicolaus A. Huber and Johannes Fritsch among his composition teachers. He was the organist of Sankt Peter from 2007 to 2021 and ran its festival of contemporary organ music, orgel-mixturen, fifteen times.
Volumina (1961/62, revised 1966) gives up melody, rhythm and harmony, the usual parameters that structure time. Timbre is the only active element, and the music becomes something perceived in space rather than in time: the title refers to stationary sound spaces of different sizes. The two études vary that idea. Harmonies is an unbroken chain of ten-note chords in which only one note changes from one chord to the next, while the registration shifts through almost imperceptible transitions. Coulée is a stream of extremely fast quavers outlining a slow chord progression, set trembling so that, in Ligeti's words, the movement "almost merges into a continuum".
Musica ricercata (1951-53), eleven pieces for piano, explores composition with the twelve chromatic semitones, starting from a single repeated note and adding one note to the pitch collection in each piece. Ligeti arranged one movement for organ himself; Susteck arranged the others in 2012. His Sprachsignale (2012), twenty-two minutes of organ improvisations, take their cue from Ligeti's Artikulation.
CD, Wergo WER 6757 2, released in April 2013, 78 minutes.
