Gyorgy Ligeti

Driving north along the San Diego Freeway, cresting over Mulholland Drive and into the San Fernando Valley on a recent glorious morning--cerulean sky, fluffy clouds, crystal-clear air after a night of rain--I had an out-of-auto experience. Traffic was light, the windows were closed and a piece of ethereal modern organ music was playing on the car stereo. It was "Harmonies" by Gyorgy Ligeti, the Hungarian composer prominently featured by the Los Angeles Philharmonic this month and next.

"Around Ligeti," the five-week festival of the music of Gyorgy Ligeti, has been the startling success of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's season. But "Around Ligeti" came to a surprising finish at season's end over the weekend. There was Ligeti's modernism, then it was no longer around, almost as if it had never been. Leonard Slatkin was on the podium.

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.

In defiance of all the sour talk about cutbacks in classical music recordings, Sony has begun a new 12-part series that will, over the next two years, include the complete works of Gyorgy Ligeti, a modernist composer widely admired in intellectual circles but not exactly a record-industry moneymaker. Who knows, however--these first four volumes are so utterly dazzling that Sony just might turn a profit on them.

Gyorgy Ligeti, a musical giant respected for his ability to simultaneously honor and modernize musical traditions and a cult pop figure whose work was used in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" to evoke the mystery of outer space, died Monday in Vienna. He was 83. The composer, who began an opera with a honking "Car Horn Prelude," had been in poor health for much of his life and suffered from a combination of diseases. The cause of his death was not given.