"Hora lunga" ("slow song"), the six-minute opening movement of György Ligeti's Sonata for Viola Solo, is perhaps the greatest paean yet written to a single string—in this case, the viola's lowest string, its "C," its most sensual asset. A long, limber melody slowly unfurls itself, sounding remarkably like a Romanian peasant song; not once does the violist leave the C string, even when the score asks for some extremely difficult high harmonics. No, the whole song continues to wrap itself around this single thread, pushing and sliding up and down its wound fibers in slow and periodic extensions. Coming from a composer who became famous writing 100-plus-note chromatic chords for full orchestra, this "Hora lunga" at first sounds like an amazing turn-around, a "coming-home" to the tactility, simplicity, and sincerity of folk and folklore.

But, like just about everything ever written by Ligeti, this movement is not what it appears. The folk song is a forgery—it's a clever, melancholy imposter to melodies of the MaramureO region; its simplicity is also illusory—the mode extends into uncharacteristically uncomfortable regions, and the demands on intonation, especially with the harmonics, are fearsome. And the movement's "sincerity" is undone by all this trickiness. In a familiar move for Ligeti, the homespun is simply pushed to far, exiled so to speak; and under the pressure of all this artifice, the folksy melody becomes overwrought and angst-ridden, we see it sweat under the lights—it "lies uncomfortably," on its instrument and to its audience.

The work's remaining five movements continue to realize what Ligeti himself called "the strangeness of the entire Sonata." The second movement, "Loop," is a jazzy exercise in musical contortion: revolving wildly in ever-changing accents and weird scalar patterns, it nevertheless binds itself at every second to one of the viola's open strings. Hence one always hears the awkward and unpredictable measured against that familiar open-fifth sound of the viola's unstopped strings. The following "Facsar" refers to the sensation in one's nose before breaking into tears; with its hazardous balance between heartfelt folk-like balladry and extremely difficult triple- and quadruple-stops, the movement also inspires fear and unease amidst pathos. The succeeding "Presto" and "Lamento" burden the sonata's already precarious axis even further: the "Presto" is all whirlwind acrobatics until a sudden splat-chord, "like a car-horn"; the "Lamento's" wail is frozen into loud hysterical outbursts and hushed, almost catatonic harmonics.

By the last movement's "Chaconne chromatique," Ligeti is spelling out this weirdness more explicitly. The title refers to the famous Baroque genre with its descending bass line and funereal air; but here the envelope is again exceeded, so that serious expression becomes a scrambling parody of itself. Amidst the sonata's resigned, quietly poker-faced end, one realizes that this work—a visitor to Romanian song, jazz and Baroque dance—is yet "thrice homeless," in the words of Gustav Mahler, a composer much-loved by Ligeti. But it's a subtle nomad, moving from place to place with great care, and departing with an impeccably precise wink.

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