This is an excellent introduction to the piano music of two of the 20th century's greatest composers. Gyorgy Ligeti's stock has only risen since his death, and much of his repulation rests on his formidable ETUDES, one of the few recently composed piano works to enter the active repertory of contemporary players. Ligeti doesn't have a method and belongs to no particular movement or school; he creatively exploited the vocabulary of postwar classical music to hone a very particular voice of his own--expressive, humorous, vivid, grotesque, sometimes macabre.
Like Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen was liberated by the harmonic freedom of modern music to forge a highly personal, even eccentric path--in his case to express and celebrate the awesome presence of God in nature. (He is perhaps the most traditionally Roman Catholic of any major composer, although that is just about the only conservative thing about him.) Far from serene, his music bursts with color and dissonance, and can be violent and terrifying in nature. The piano cycle VINGT REGARDS SUR L'ENFANT-JESUS is quintessential Messaien, and the pianist Volker Banfield gives these excerpts a fluent reading with plenty of splash.