Kurtag Score

[Azalee Rowling]

Thecomposition was first conceived as a work for piano in 1993, which was dedicated to Andrs Mihly. Kurtg completed the orchestral score as a commission of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1994, while he was the composer-in-residence for the orchestra.[1] The piece was premiered in Berlin, on 14 December 1994, by the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado, both of these being the dedicatees.[2] It was published in 2003 by Editio Musica Budapest.[3]

Stele is in three movements and takes up to thirteen minutes to perform.[1] The three movements are untitled and are usually referenced by their tempo. All of the movements are meant to be played attacca. The movements are:

The final version of the score also includes a 2006 addition to the ending of the score which changes the last bar of the last movement and adds four more bars, extending the last notes played by the instruments. So far, both endings are accepted, even though the first one is still recorded more frequently.[citation needed]

It was a whopping surprise when Milan's La Scala announced in 2018 that Gyrgy Kurtg had written his first opera! Not a few people in the contemporary music scene hardly believed this would happen any more. Work on the score dragged on for a total of eight years, and Kurtg even allowed a premiere planned for the Salzburg Festival to fall through. But finally the work was complete, and the Hungarian doyen handed over the score, nearly 400 pages long, to Markus Stenz, who was to conduct the first performance. 15 November saw the curtain rise at the legendary La Scala for Kurtg's Beckett opera Fin de Partie, which became a resounding success with international critics and audiences alike. In October 2023, the monumental work is also performed at the Elbphilharmonie.

Once more, Kurtg had pulled off the balance between daring, blazing expressiveness and familiar references to tradition la Monteverdi: a stylistic blend with which he has been appealing to the wider public and contemporary music insiders alike for years, indeed decades.

That was to change in one fell swoop for both Boulez and Kurtg. Since his success in Paris, Kurtg's works have been played all over the world by renowned interpreters from Claudio Abbado to Pierre-Laurent Aimard. In a ranking of the most frequently-played modern compositions, Kurtg's Hommage Robert Schumann for clarinet, viola and piano is very close to the top of the list. And in addition to highly-endowed leading music prizes like the Grawemeyer Award and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, he was even awarded the Golden Lion at the Biennale di Venezia for his life's work. Hardly any other composer of his generation enjoys such a positive response, so much recognition and in particular admiration as Gyrgy Kurtg.

But standing in the limelight doesn't come naturally to Kurtg. Beyond the confines of the concert hall, he is among the quieter stars of contemporary music, a master of the art of eloquent silence. He never took an interest in all the ideological trench warfare that some composers, including his old friend and former fellow student Gyrgy Ligeti, conducted so vociferously starting in the 1960s.

Instead, Kurtg continues to this day to devote his time to a musical idiom that has evolved, well removed from all fashions and pigeonholes, into one of the most original styles in modern music. Working in seclusion in rural France, he places restlessly flickering vocal cycles alongside piano arrangements of gentle Bach chorales. Kurtg has written pieces for string quartet as well as for the classic Balkan instrument called the cymbal. And among the hundreds of piano miniatures he has written since 1973, publishing them under the title Jtkok (Games), we find musical tributes to the Devil's violinist Paganini, to German avant-garde guru Stockhausen and even to Nancy My Baby Shot Me Down Sinatra!

Thus the rich history of Western music, spanning seven centuries from the Middle Ages to the present day, presents a huge body of inspiration for Kurtg. Two 20th century composers have had a particularly strong influence on him. Firstly, there was his countryman Bla Bartk, whose music with its widespread use of Hungarian folk tradition fascinated him from an early age. Even though Kurtg did not manage to gain a place at the Budapest Conservatoire in 1945 to study under Bartk, he still sees Bartk as his artistic foster father.

Kurtg's second guiding light was to be Schnberg pupil Anton Webern. He first encountered Webern's work in the late 1950s in Paris, where he was studying with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. But Kurtg suddenly fell into an artistic crisis, from which the psychologist and art therapist Marianne Stein rescued him: she advised him to start from zero, as it were, and to work with radically reduced patterns of notes such as were typical of Webern's music.

The German music critic and musicologist Wolfgang Sandner once described Kurtg's style as containing a minimum number of notes and the maximum expression. Since his Opus 1, a string quartet he wrote in 1959, he has honed this style tirelessly, often for many years, to approach what he calls the truth. The outcome are masterpieces where every note sits exactly where it belongs.

Sometimes, these masterpieces tell little burlesque stories in the shortest space of time, such as the piano pieces Hampeln-Strampeln and Mit den Handflchen, each only half a minute long. Then the unusual line-up of soprano and violin explores in the Kafka Fragments with in places just one, two, three little waltz steps the Prague writer's ambiguous world (of thought). This Kafka reading programme in music consists of some 40 miniatures.

And even if some of these little pieces again last for only a few seconds, we can apply anew to Kurtg's work what Arnold Schnberg once said about the music of Anton Webern: he could express the content of a entire novel with a single gesture, and pure bliss in a single breath. And then there is something else that Kurtg has a talent for, too: he can tell a wonderful joke with just a handful of notes.

Six months has passed since my previous concert with the London Symphony Orchestra and their Music Director Sir Simon Rattle. Today, those wonderful performances of Berg and Beethoven at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie seem to belong into a whole another era, a golden age of yore.

Since then, the performing arts have faced an unparalleled catastrophe, brought upon by the COVID-19. The closings of concert halls and opera houses silenced the orchestras more or less globally, resulting in a serious economic and psychological blow to the whole industry. In countries where the arts organizations operate without public funding, for the most part, at least, the orchestras have taken the hardest blow.

Programme-wise, the LSO could not have chosen a more befitting, inspiring and uplifting playlist. With Dame Mitsuko Uchida as soloist, the orchestra and Rattle provided their online audiences with a dazzling selection of musical masterstrokes, encompassing over four hundred years of our sonic history.

Two Canzons by Giovanni Gabrieli, from the famous 1597 collection of Sacrae symphoniae were sounded from the Royal Albert Hall galleries in by the marvellous LSO brass, framing a sequence of pieces by Sir Edward Elgar, Ludwig van Beethoven and Gyrgy Kurtg.

Written in 1905 for an all-Elgar programme, with the composer conducting then newly-established LSO, the Introduction and Allegro for string orchestra is a beautiful study. Hovering between chamber music and orchestral writing, the score calls for a quartet of soloist, appearing in dialogue with a large string ensemble.

Words fail to quite capture the profound beauty and clarity of this most extraordinary music. The gentle string counterpoint provides the dimly-lit surroundings for the rays of light provided by the glistening solo wind lines, coloured by percussion.

Rattle and the LSO owned Dawn from the opening pizzicato to the stunning arpeggio closing, unveiling a completely unique musical statement, to a cathartic effect. As a well-earned salute, Rattle and the musicians gave Ads a heartfelt ovation, one undoubtably joined by a deeply moved global audience.

The first movement, Preludio, opens with a tranquil horn-call, answered by soft violins over a pedal point by lower strings. From these first bars on, the symphony bears ravishing modal lyricism, first manifested in Fantasy on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910/1913/1919).

With economy and invention worthy of late Sibelius, the movement grows from its subtle opening to wondrous sounding spheres, shun of all sentimentality, yet ever deeply moving. Following a stormy climax reminiscent of the Pastoral Symphony (1919-21), the movement competes its arch by fading into distance, accompanied by those very horn calls fro the opening.

Following the Preludio, an agile Scherzo ensues, with dexterous string and wind passages, punctuated by sublime timpani. The music evokes an exquisite realm of fantasy, with a fascinating play of light and shadow. Albeit brief, the Scherzo is no mere interlude, but a concise sounding arch.

The third movement is the dramatic core of the symphony, built upon a fine-tuned orchestral dramaturgy. Again, in a Sibelian vein, the music is devoid of big gestures, forcing the listener truly concentrate in each and every detail.

With Rattle, the LSO gave the Vaughan Williams Fifth a performance of a lifetime. Clad in intense beauty, with extraordinary detail and nuance, the music was unveiled within a wonderfully architectured symphonic whole.

Though distanced onstage, or perhaps precisely for that reason, the symphony bore an aura of intimacy, as if the fifty members of the LSO were turned into one large chamber ensemble. The textures were ever translucent, glimmering in riveting harmonic colours.

One of my big regrets is missing the concert with Gyrgy Kurtg and his wife Mrta back at the Southbank Centre some ten years ago. We've lost Mrta now, yet at ninety eight, Gyrgy is still composing, there are plans for a new opera after the success of his take on Samuel Beckett's Endgame. He wasn't present, but we could feel him in the Grand Hall.

It's taken days to truly digest the concert at the Royal Academy of Music, a full performance of Kurtg's Jtkok. Meaning 'Games' in Hungarian, his inspiration is children and the fun they have in play. What follows is a remarkable broad palette for mostly two grand pianos. We got to see the sheet music for this will pieces (though the lovely Bach transcriptions were not displayed), the names of each work and directions in Hungarian, German and English. This was such fun, each brief piece was a mere page or two. All together throughout the day, there were four hundred pieces, in an immense six and a half hours of music.

My utmost respect to the students who played throughout and Joanna MacGregor, head of piano at the academy. Her playing was noteworthy for his humour and viscous moments left me stimulated. I felt the warm support she gave each pupil playing together or as a solo. Each student offered something different, clear and sharp in their approach. In the score, a delight was seeing Kurtg's scribbled circles to dictate a tone cluster, usually full hands or forearms on the keys. Later these sadly disappeared in later sets, I would assume to a digital format being used or just a change in style. One note-worthy work was Bored, the pianist stood up and walked back and forth around the piano casually playing as they went, indifferent to what was played per se.

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