Gyorgy Ligeti was the foremost Hungarian composer of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, very much seen as the heir to Bela Bartok (1881-1945.) With his style proving too modernist for the Soviet Hungarian authorities, he emigrated to Austria in 1956, later taking citizenship, where he was free to join the avant-garde of the post-World War Two European music scene. His earliest composition bore resemblance to Bartok, but he would later experiment with electronic music, before gaining fame for the ferociously chromatic “Atmospheres” for orchestra (1961) and notoriety for his “Poeme symphonique” for one hundred metronomes.

The Six Bagatelles are arrangements by Ligeti of a selection from his eleven-movement piano cycle “Musica Ricercata” (1953) in which the first movement is restricted to only two, pitches, the second to three, building up to the full twelve notes of the Western chromatic scale in the final movement. The opening Bagatelle showcases this method and its potential by generating multiple exciting ideas from just four pitches. In the work’s premier, the set was performed without the finale, as it is was considered “too dangerous” by the Soviet Hungarian authorities.