Keller Quartet – Ligeti: string quartets 1 & 2; Barber: Adagio

György Ligeti's First Quartet (1953-54) was a bottom-drawer work in his native Hungary for being too adventurous. And after his flight to the West in 1956 it became bottom drawer because it was too conservative — "prehistoric," he called it. It sounds anything but that in the Keller Quartet's new account, which mesmerisingly balances the music's Bartókian roots and its suggestions of a fully Ligetian future. The Second Quartet of 1968 is a calling card piece, demonstrating favourite compositional techniques in a potently distilled manner, which the Kellers manage to make seem more mainstream that would ever have been imaginable in the 1960s. Barber's Adagio is not as abrupt a transition as you might expect, but the Kellers' playing of it is very ordinary beside their Ligeti. url.ie/7ebo