Classical music: Said the spider to the fly...

For once, Radio 3 has forgotten its addiction to anniversaries and indulged in a small celebration of Gyorgy Ligeti (born 28 May 1923). He was last week's Composer of the Week at midday and this week's at night; one of the Philharmonia's concerts in a three-year retrospective was broadcast on Monday night, and tomorrow Ligeti is even Michael Berkeley's guest in Private Passions - one guaranteed not to choose Strauss's Four Last Songs.

As a survivor from what he ironically calls the days of the avant-garde Utopia of the 1960s, Ligeti has become a bit of a guru, and his opinion of other composers is sometimes used as a sort of endorsement. Of Conlon Nancarrow, for instance, whose ruthless rhythmic experiments for player- piano Ligeti has borrowed - or rather, stolen - and crafted with an old European feeling for poetry. As Ligeti told Stephen Plaistow with knowing naivete, he has always been fascinated by spiders and their webs and, in his recent Study No 15 for piano, he compares his deliberate spoiling of mathematical procedures to the way a spider's web is distorted by the prey it traps. That's no more, really, than the conventional wisdom of composition teachers: once a system interferes with your artistic goal, break it.

One thing to enjoy in this final interview of the week was - is, if you hear it repeated tonight (11.30pm) - Ligeti's lack of inhibition about identifying a general quality he seeks in all his music: iridescence. In a sense, iridescence is yet another form of ambiguity, and ambiguity seems central to present-day music, maybe because we're not certain of anything, though it's also a source of richness.

Ligeti has always been a good talker, and it happens that his way of working lends itself to explanation. But interviews with musicians of any sort are rarely so revealing, and "stars" are so wise to the pressures of marketing, they tend to watch their backs. Barbara Bonney, in last week's Voices, was too good to be true, though that's rather the way she sings, and the examples she chose from her own recordings, ranging from Bach to Bernstein, were certainly lovely. Iain Burnside gently sent her up at one point, tutting at her West Swedish dialect (whatever) when she sang Norwegian, but she let the dig pass. Once, in a very prestigious recital series in Vienna, her voice began to give out and she invited members of the audience to sing instead of her. She got two volunteers and turned a recital into a masterclass.

Adrian Jack