Kurtág reviews
Plaisirs illuminés
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), et al; Camerata Bern/Francisco Coll (Alpha Classics)
Solo II (Tabea Zimmermann)
Tabea Zimmermann (violin) (Myrios)
Love and Death
Navarra String Quartet (Orchid Classics)
Kurtág: Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir
Many of the pieces included in this three-disc set are available in other versions, but this ECM project has a special feeling of authenticity about it. That’s partly because Reinbert de Leeuw has extensive experience conducting Kurtág’s music; but also because Kurtág himself was consulted in detail about these new performances as they were recorded, edited, and in some cases re-recorded as a result of his comments.
The Molinari Quartet perform Kurtag's Complete String Quartets
Kurtág wrote his First String Quartet (1959) after spending days in a Paris library copying out Webern’s works. You can hear it. But while its brevity and fractured apprehension resonate, this was the moment the Hungarian began to forge his own language, one of silences, scattered pitches, jittery ostinatos and microtonal meshes, beside which Webern’s music sounds positively Romantic in its sustained development. A Webern canon, too, is in the DNA of Officium Breve, Op. 28, one of Kurtág’s most performed pieces and an absolute tour de force.
Melzer and Stark sing Kurtág
'This is the best recorded version available'
Kurtag: Omaggio a Luigi Nono, Op. 16; Eight Choruses to Poems by Dezsö Tandori, Op. 23; Songs of Despair and Sorrow, Op. 18
As with his music in other genres, Kurtág’s choral music tends to collections of aphorisms and intense moments of feeling, but his immaculate spacing of voices and wide range of vocal techniques give these works a vividness, an urgent sense of communication not always present in his instrumental pieces.
Kurtag: Kafka-Fragmente, Op. 24
If the fragment is the archetypal 20th-century art-work, Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente of 1985-86 seems the archetypal late 20th-century song-cycle. Consisting of 40, mainly tiny, movements for soprano and violin – on phrases and sentences extracted from the author’s letters and diaries – Kafka-Fragmente imposes its own order and interpretation on these desolate, ambiguous texts by means of piercing expressionist gesture. Paul Griffiths’s notes compare it to Schubert’s Winterreise, except that here the journey is wholly internal, the landscape that of the restless mind and despairing heart.
Liszt, Dohndnyi, Koddly, Bartok, Weiner, Kurtag, Szollosy
Frankl's andiology provides a generous survey of a century of Hungarian piano music, from late Liszt (around 1885) to recent Szollosy (1988). All are distinctly Hungarian in their harmonies and rhythms, though it is interesting to note the shift from the gypsy influence upon Liszt to the more purely Magyar folk-inspired style of Bartok and his contemporaries.
Kurtag: Signs, Games and Messages; Hölderlin Gesänge; ... pas à pas - nulle part…
In Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia there’s an apocalyptic scene where a man has to carry a guttering candle through a stagnant pond; if the candle goes out, the world perishes. It’s a scene György Kurtág asked the players on this CD to imagine while rehearsing ‘Eine Blume für Dénes Zsigmondy’, one of the 19 vividly intense miniatures that makes up Signs, Games and Messages. It clearly worked. You can really feel a sense of agonised careful slowness as one strange haunted sound moves to the next.
Kurtag: Kafka Fragments
Each of these Fragments is such a ‘little world made cunningly’ that forty of them is almost too much to listen to at one sitting. Kurtág’s art of distillation is that of his own musical history and of his own life experience: never a technical end in itself. The placing of every note, the shaping of every phrase, is precisely imagined to bear his own vivid and compassionate response to a text, and to communicate it passionately. These particular Fragments are described perfectly in the enclosed notes as the reflection of Kafka’s ‘world of glass shattered into tiny shards’.
Kurtag: Aus der Ferne III; Officium breve; Ligatura-Message to Frances-Marie; String Quartet, Op. 1; Hommage à András Mihály
György Kurtág’s unique, utterly consistent output is finally getting its proper representation on disc, with tributes for his seventieth birthday last year providing the final push towards the recognition he deserves. These four works for quartet, plus the two versions for two cellos, two violas and celesta of Ligatura-Message to Frances-Marie (The answered unanswered question) fill in another gap in the portrait.
Kurtag
‘That’s another Sunday over. That means the next will come.’ The latest offering from EJ Thribb, poet-in-residence at Private Eye? No, it’s one of the 40 or so tiny poems by Rimma Dalos which appear on this disc in settings by the contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág.
Kurtág is clearly in the line of those composers such as Schubert and Schoenberg who can take bad poetry and turn it into pure gold. These settings are marvels of intense expression on a tiny scale – many of the songs are less than a minute long. But they’re not just a collection of Expressionist sighs and shrieks.