The document describes composer György Kurtág's 90th birthday celebration concert which featured performances of his works. It discusses how Kurtág intensely critiqued one performer's interpretation of his piece, having her repeat a cadence for 10 minutes until he was satisfied. Another performer played with "irreverent ferocity" in contrast. The concert highlighted Kurtág's focus on musical fragments and layering in his compositions. Kurtág remains active at 90 years old, though his music may blossom even more after he is no longer around to intensely interpret his own works.

1. april 2016 classicalmusicmagazine.org 67
KURTÁG AT 90
me. Perhaps what those words meant was
that the composer could do as he pleased
over the course of the proceedings.
That is certainly what he did. After
Hilary Summers and her pianist Arnaud
Arbet had performed ‘Roundelay’ – an
excerpt from Kurtág’s in-progress opera
based on Beckett’s Endgame – the com-
poser started issuing further interpretative
instructions from his seat a few rows from
the stage. Eventually he was helped up on
to the stage, where he unseated Arbet from
the piano and proceeded to pull Summers’
performance apart in the most excruciating
detail. Excruciating for Summers, as it was
often extremely difficult to decipher what he
wanted (she handled it with professionalism,
humour and compliance); excruciating for
the rest of us, despite the obvious fascina-
tion, as it involved hearing one five-note
cadence repeated for nearly ten minutes
with the very-real danger of a complete com-
municative breakdown between composer
and performer (some clever official ended it
all by bursting into a roaring ovation during
a lingering pause).
‘He has it in his head, and he can sing it
in his voice, but translating that into what
a singer has to do, well, you always have to
compromise,’ Summers told me afterwards.
‘But that’s the special thing about [his
music]. He’s got this idea, this image, and it’s
not the norm.’
Indeed. The following evening, in the
newly-restored Liszt Academy, Concerto
Budapest and soloists presented an all-
Kurtág menu to mark the composer’s actual
birthday: five pieces by him and one by his
son, György Kurtág junior. The programme
ended with Petite musique solennelle, the
homage to Boulez that turned out to be a
commemoration of him. But the highlight
was the double concerto for piano and cello
played by Tamara Stefanovich and Louise
Hopkins. This is a truly enchanting piece,
the composer’s already intense processes
of distillation now appearing like a tiny
creature foraging on a forest floor, stopping
occasionally to look skyward – intricate,
fidgeting detail giving way to sudden
breadth and light.
That it was so effective was partly because
Hopkins played with irreverent ferocity.
That felt like a shift from all the delicate,
respectful bowing and scraping, espe-
cially coming straight after Pierre-Laurent
Aimard’s performance of …quasi una fanta-
sia… for piano and orchestra, in which the
pianist looked terrified (but then, doesn’t
he always?) while appearing to walk on
eggshells. Perhaps he was in the hall for the
Summers performance the night before, and
the free-spirited Hopkins wasn’t.
Still, Aimard has a commanding way with
Kurtág’s passing fragments – their drifting,
floating and stinging – a hallmark of much
of the composer’s writing that was fore-
grounded in this concert. Before a note was
played Sir Simon Rattle appeared on a screen
to convey a message from his Berlin Philhar-
monic (Kurtág was composer-in-residence at
the Philharmonie 1993-95). Rattle referred
to ‘fragments of such extreme weight, depth
and meaning’ in the composer’s music, which
just about captured it. Like a canvas worked
over and over, there are multiple layers in even
the most fleeting gestures of a work like New
Messages for Orchestra. Sometimes the thin-
ner the texture, the more it holds.
The very idea of fragments, and the com-
ing together of so many human and musical
ones for this event, is representative of Kur-
tág’s fractured geopolitical existence in the
20th century. These days he lives in France
with his wife Márta, who barely left his side
all weekend. A recurring theme was a much-
aired video of the two of them playing part
of Bach’s Actus Tragicus on a cheap upright
piano with immense ‘oneness’.
György Kurtág had an easy smile fixed on
his face whenever I saw him (even during
the Summers affair), receiving multiple
well-wishers with good grace. He is frail but
his mind remains sharp. I wish him many
more years of health and productivity. But
with his levels of interpretative exactitude,
perhaps his music’s beauty will blossom even
more when he’s no longer around to try to
explain it. CM
Honoured: ‘Kurtág mined deeper and deeper into Hungary’s sonic soil’
CM0416_066-067_F_Kurtág.indd 67 15/03/2016 17:11:00