Time was when one of the regular complaints about the Belfast Festival was its virtual exclusion of contemporary music. The neglect of local composers remains, but major international figures are now generously represented.
The Harty Room on Monday night was the venue for the fullest exposure yet before an Irish audience of the ongoing series of Etudes by Gyorgy Ligeti, widely acclaimed as one of the major piano compositions of the age.
Ligeti has acknowledged the influence on these pieces of African music, fractals, the rhythmically intricate player piano studies of the late Conlon Nancarrow, jazz (Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans), and, of course, the work of some of the great pianist/composers of the Western classical tradition.
Yet each of his studies - Rolf Hind's programme ran to 16 of them - is unmistakably Ligetian. You can detect his glee in setting up machine-like patterns that never do quite what you expect, venturing into areas of improbability or apparent impossibility, and still, paradoxically, retaining a strong feeling of organic coherence.
Hind delivered them with a sort of deadpan, computational efficiency, in a style that might be expected to hinder the establishment of their individual character or limit the appeal of so many at one sitting. But, no. This is music which can speak very well for itself, whether it's in modes of frenzy or calm, mimicking the growth of some fantastical vine as seen in a time-lapse film, or relaxing in quieter realms of para-Debussyish haloes.
And, on Tuesday night, Hind followed up with Charles Ives's protean Concord Sonata, a piece which, to the composer, always seemed "unfinished" and to modern ears always manages to sound excitingly uncontainable. Hind's performance of this challenging, prolix, pianistic Everest was exhilarating.
