One new work by Gyorgy Ligeti would be treat enough, but there were two in the London Sinfonietta's concert, conducted by George Benjamin. As well as the British premiere of his horn concerto, the Hamburgisches Konzert, first performed two weeks ago in Hamburg, there was a chance for London to catch up with an even more recent piece, Sippal, Dobbal, Nadimegeduvel, a song cycle to poems by Sandor Weores, finished last year.
Ligeti's tribute to his fellow countryman - he describes Weores as "Hungary's Mozart" - is typically wry and playful. The seven little settings pit a mezzo-soprano (the spell-binding Katalin Karolyi) against four percussionists, who as well as having to strike and stroke the usual range of instruments, have to play harmonicas and swanee whistles. Unaccountably, the Sinfonietta's programme included no translations of the texts, but the diverse ways in which they are delivered - as guttural exclamations, a patter song, a lilting lullaby - suggest that all human life is contained in the poems, while the percussionists create ever-changing webs of colour around them. The result is typically unclassifiable; if Ligeti ever gets around to writing the second opera he has contemplated now for more than 20 years (based on Alice in Wonderland), it might, one suspects, sound a bit like this.
What is unexpected about the Hamburgisches Konzert, though, is how it harks back to the world of Ligeti's earlier works. Harmonically everything may have changed - one of the points of the new concerto, in which the solo horn is accompanied by four natural horns in the chamber orchestra, is the exploration of tunings and harmonies outside the conventional western system.
But the shifting textures of the first of the six tiny movements look back to Ligeti's musical cloudscapes of the 1960s, while the frantic canon for the orchestra that ends the fourth recalls the manic clockworks of a few years later. Elsewhere, there are long, sinuous melodies and echo effects between the soloist and his four siblings that conjure up the forest images so deeply embedded in central European folklore.
Somehow all these disparate miniatures add up to a substantial experience. Ligeti challenges the performers in new ways, without resorting to cheap effects: the horn part is ferociously difficult - Michael Thompson seemed to have mastered it consummately - and the writing for the orchestra isn't far behind. Further performances, no doubt, will bring even more rewards.
