György Kurtág
Játékok
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Pentatone PTC 5187 030 125:12 mins (2CD)
Clip: György Kurtág – Sirens of the Deluge
The longest item in this collection of 79 pieces lasts three minutes and 48 seconds, and it consists of a few angry cluster-chords. Its title is ‘Rituale – Kalman Strem in memoriam’: one of many funeral laments for members of György Kurtág’s circle of friends.
We never learn anything about these people, nor even anything about the composer’s late wife Marta, who has been his lifelong muse. Those of us who witnessed their final four-hand recital at the Southbank Centre a few years ago got a privileged – and very moving – glimpse of a cloudlessly devoted marriage. Now she has gone, and at the age of 99 he no longer has the manual dexterity to play his own music, simple though it sounds. Hence the presence of Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the keyboard, a man who has spent four decades studying with Kurtág, and whose playing bears the master’s whole-hearted imprimatur.
Entitled Játékok (Games) these works have been compared with Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. But although one of Kurtág’s biggest concerns has been to free children from pianistic drudgery – and although his first book of Játékok revolutionised piano teaching in Hungary – they are not explicitly educational pieces of music.
What they are is a form of self-therapy for the composer. As Zoltán Farkas observes in his illuminating programme note, Kurtág’s life has been a rollercoaster of fertile periods alternating with tortured creative blocks. He was helped out of the first of these by a psychotherapist who told him to join two notes together, and to concentrate on the relationship between them. He was lifted out of his next depression by a request from a Hungarian piano teacher to write some pieces for children. As he said later, ‘Our whole life is nothing but a pilgrimage in order to claim the child lost within us. I penetrate into the depth of the child-like core of my still untouched being, in order to seek out what is true in music, and I offer to adults my own creative knowledge: we are all children.’
The words describing many of these tiny miniatures reflect the intimacy of this form of communication: message, letter, farewell, consolation, homage. Some are clearly the continuation of a conversation: ‘…why should I…’, ‘…just so…’, ‘…waiting for Susan…’ And some are playful: ‘…le chien… to Gyuri for his 65th’; ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin – enragée’. The last piece of all is entitled ‘Farewell – to My Dear Friend Andras Wilhelm 25/1/2022’, and the instrument on which he chooses to play this is the clavichord, whose delicate whisper was also beloved by Bach and the aged Haydn. And it’s interesting to learn that towards the end of his life, he has sung with a choir specialising in Gregorian chant.
As he closes this 40-year creative arc, we find Kurtág using these pieces as his language of love, celebrating the longevity of some friends, and mourning the passage of others. Defying literal interpretation, he plucks notes out of the air, and with the aid of the sustaining pedal, infuses them with life. Michael Church