Ligeti’s Music Rewards Stalwart Listeners

Gyorgy Ligeti was at it again Monday, this time in an unlikely place. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s festival devoted to the Hungarian avant-gardist made a stop at Gindi Auditorium, home of the orchestra’s normally more conservative chamber music series.

Some subscribers voiced their resentment of this modernistic intrusion in conversations before the concert. Others simply walked out at intermission, leaving what had been a full house half-empty.

Modern music does this to people. The thing is, Ligeti’s doesn’t have to. For all of its strangeness to the uninitiated, it builds on tradition rather than flouting it. The Etudes for Piano, played brilliantly Monday by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, stand squarely in the tradition of the character pieces of Chopin and Debussy--indeed, many of them stray but an inch from the harmony of the latter. Franz Liszt, who wrote and played music much like this, would have had a grand time with the Etudes.

Etude No. 13, “The Devil’s Staircase,” makes a fierce display of climbing kinetic energy, chromatically sinister, like many of Liszt’s works. The wondrous “Vertigo” (No. 9) sends dizzying spirals downward, slowly splitting apart to leave a giant hole in the sound. And the poetic “Warsaw Autumn” (No. 6), with the encroaching chill of its harmonies, captures the falling leaves through a collage of descending lines drifting at different speeds.

Aimard, who played with utmost precision and virtuosic abandon--you wondered, at times, if he might hurt himself--performed the first 16 Etudes (to which the composer continues to add). He shook his page-turner’s hand afterward, as if that job alone was hard enough.

Though difficult to execute, the Horn Trio, the other work on the program, is an epic drama, not a virtuoso vehicle. Played keenly and heroically by pianist Gloria Cheng-Cochran, violinist Martin Chalifour and hornist Brian Drake, it is music that dances on a precipice, theatrical in its immediacy.

In all, another great night of Ligeti, for those who could take it.