Remembering Márta Kurtág - a true artist and human being

Márta Kurtág has died.  Her relationship with György Kurtág was very much a partnership of creative equals. They were together for 73 years, working, playing and inspiring each other. Shockingly, wikipedia leaves her out of his entry !  She was a great pianist in her own right. Fortunately, we were privileged to experience  them together many times : the symbiosis between them was so strong, it was palpable. In recitals, they often played together, picking up on each other so closely it was as if they were two parts of the same whole. That chemistry seemed to impart to those around them, too. Many of their students became very close personal friends and colleeagues. What a warm, sympathetic person Márta was ! Her spirit will live on.
Hearing them play together their performance embodied a lot about the Kurtág ethos of understatement. They would sit before a humble upright piano, just as if they were at home. No grandstanding. Backs to the audience, expressing the essence of music, drawing the listener into that private inner circle, like part of the family.  Sometimes their arms would cross diagonally so each would be playing at the opposite end of the keyboard. The world has lost someone who understood what it is to be a true artist, and human.

György Kurtág Kafka Fragments Linbury

György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments is on at the Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House. Kafka Fragments is an excellent way to experience Kurtág's highly distinctive music.  Like so much of the composer's work, Kafka Fragments is aphoristic, as cryptic as  epigram, as concise as haiku.

Kurtág and Kafka were made for each other. The "fragments" are taken from letters and diary entries, chosen out of context and often incomplete. Each snippet thus becomes an entity in itself, disassociated from context but rearranged with new relationships. Kurtág often speaks of games of chance. His puzzles fall into place when performers and listeners engage with what they hear.

Kafka Fragments is intriguing because it tests the mettle of those taking part. Performances are surprisingly frequent, though it would be hard to better Juliane Banse and András Keller, who developed their approach together with the composer himself. See my review of their Wigmore Hall concert in 2011. The Linbury Studio production should be good because Claire Booth is singing. She's the muse of contemporary British music. The violinist will be Peter Manning.

Best of all, I think, will be Netia Jones's production. Jones has created a niche for subtle semi-stagings which don't overpower the music, but obliquely hint at levels of meaning. Remember Oliver Knussen's Sendak operas Higgelty Piggelty Pop! and Where the Wild Things Are (reviewed here) ?. And her Before Life and After, a semi staging of Tippett, Britten and Finzi, which has become a perennial on the live circuit ? (reviewed here).  Of Kafka Fragments, Jones says "We are presenting projected translations of the text all the way through. You have to be able to read and understand the actual fragments to grasp their many layers and to know why Kurtág has set them the way he has. The projections also offer moments of illumination. It’s not just about casting light in a physical sense, but offering visual guidance to enable us to grasp the meaning better: fleeting moments when something is illuminated before the light goes off."

This is a completely different approach to Peter Sellars' staging reviewed here, which massacred the music, the composer, and the author. "I get my best ideas when I'm cleaning the bathroom" he told us at the pre-event talk. Whatever Kafka Fragments may or may not be, it's not literal!

ADDENDUM : I was surprised how well Claire Booth created these pieces. While Juliane Banse sings with cool detachment, intensifying the surreal nature of the snippets, Booth sings with feisty, combative vigour. Both approaches are valid. These fragments don't come from formal literature but from random jottings, which reflect Kafka the man rather than Kafka the artist.  Booth brought out the wry humour that Kurtág loves so dearly. It's almost central to his music. "Schlaft, erwacht, schlaft, erwacht!" How boring that routine is ! Kurtág illustrates it so the line sways mechanically like a wind-up toy.

Netia Jones's staging was good because it evoked a feeling of print on paper : images of typescript in black and white, sometimes clear, sometimes fuzzy, sometimes only emerging in short bursts. It made me think about the fragility of written words. These fragments could so easily have been lost, but Kurtág has preserved them. He doesn't tell us how the pieces fit together. That's up to us. It's like a throw of the I-Ching. The runes come up on set sequences, but interpretation is intuitive.  Jones gives us clues, like a shaft of diagonal light, over which Booth walks, as if on a tightrope. We know it's just a film projection, but the image suggests many things.  What I .love about Kurtág is that he opens up possibilities. Listeners who need rigid rules will never "get" his quirky wit.

Kurtág Kafka Fragments Keller and Banse, Wigmore Hall

György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments is a masterpiece, one of the seminal works of the late 20th century. Absolutely essential is the recording by Juliane Banse and András Keller, on ECM (2006). To hear Banse and Keller perform it live at the Wigmore Hall was a great experience.


Kurtág's music is deceptive. Because he writes aphoristically, his miniatures seem simple. But Kurtág likes puzzles. His music opens out, like a complex maze entered through a tiny door. Its secrets lie not so much in what's on the page, but what's not. His notations are unorthodox, so can't be followed on autopilot. Instead, Kurtág's performance depends on the innate musicality of those who perform the work, and how well they intuit his idiom.

Most music only "becomes" music when played by those who understand what's happening, but much more so with an idiom as elusive as Kurtág's.  For all the inventive freedom and whimsy he embodies, Kurtág's music requires superlative discipline and attentiveness. The Wigmore Hall recently hosted Kurtág's Ghosts, a series of workshops led by Julian Phillips. (Read more about it by following the link).The series was designed around Marino Formenti's montage entitled Kurtág's Ghosts, where tiny snippets of Kurtág's music are placed besides snippets of music by the composers to whom his own music refers. Not at all as simple a process as might seem. It involves really knowing Kurtág's music in detail and tracing where his sources come from. "Looking for the perfect fragment of Scarlatti was difficult", said Formenti in the workshop, "because there isn't one single moment when Scarlatti "is" ". That's Kurtág's spirit, drawing the listener in deeper and deeper

Kurtág's Kafka Fragments are intense, homeopathic distilllations of ideas from Kafka's letters and diaries. The gist is that they are "fragments" not whole quotations. What is not said is every bit as important as what is.  Meaning doesn't depend on words alone. Hence the absolute importance of well-informed, intuitive performance. András Keller has worked with Kurtág for decades and is one of his primary interpreters,. Kurtág himself worked with Keller and Banse as they developed their interpretation.

Indeed, the very idea that Kurtág's Kafka Fragments is a song cycle is misleading. Hearing Banse and Keller interact live, showed just how much the work is a delicately-poised balance between violin and voice. It's a primarily musical dialogue, too, for Kurtág's expression comes from the way he sculpts sound and uses intervals. Text setting this isn't, rather a sophisticated use of sound and silence to evolve an impressionistic panaorama of diffuse feelings and ideas.

The first sound you hear is the violin, creating a swaying zig zag. Like a door swinging open? Banse's voice enters, completely in synch with Keller's playing. Die Guten gehn in gleichen Schritt, personified. Significantly, the nest line refers to "others" who dance around them, unaware. Immediately, Kurtág establishes a sense of movement and purpose. Perhaps the central image in the Kafka Fragments is that of an esoteric pathway, deliberately obscured. The violin soars in wild frenzy. Banse simply has to speak the title of the fourth song, Ruhelos. No need for elaboration. Keller comments, without words.

Keller and Banse bring out the musicality in the piece to an extraordinary degree because they understand the internal logic.  For example, Banse leaps up and down the scale within the words Nimmermehr, Niummermehr,. By replicating  the swaying zig zag with which the violin began the piece, she's showing how the structure of the work is evolving. It's a quick Ruckblick befiore the next stage in the journey, In the next fragment, she sings Immer, Immer, with a similar but subtly different sweep : voice as violin again. Keller's playing intensifies the wild swings, Banse's voice responding with force. Then, suddenly silence.

The two Berceuses aren't restful, even though they refer to sleep. Quietness doesn't mean repose. Intervals are carefully placed so the word Aufgewacht leaps out. Banse spits the word out almost in a single syllable. Her voice sounds like a violin string being pulled tautly. Vibration but tightly controlled. Ticking patterns, as Keller taps bow against the neck of the violin. Banse sings staccato, not sharp but resonant, like wood on wood.

The idea of voice/violin balance is further explored in the fragment that refers to Balzac. Banse enunciates the first words in each sentence, with vaguely Sprechstimme deliberation, but leaps in  tune with Keller's violin on the word Hindernisse, both times it's repeated. Another echo of the swaying imagery. Then the violin creates a bizarre sound like that of a door that has long been closed stiff, being slowly prised open. A metaphor? Entirely apt.

Keller unleashes brilliantly virtuosic leaps and elisions.  The singing becomes abstract,, following the patterns in the music. The last thing you'd want to hear here is a voice as "persona", I think, for what matters is the smooth integration of two instruments, one string, one wind. This intense intimacy reminded me of the way Kurtág and his wife Marta play together, as if they're a single organism operating in two halves. Banse turns Keller's sheets for him so he doesn't miss a nano second, which makes a difference in  music like this. Although the gesture is made without sound, it is very much part of the true meaning of the piece.

Then just as you've got into the elliptical vibe, Kurtág cuts it off. Tapping sounds, the word Nichts squeaked shrilly so it doesn't sound human, but violin like. Nichts dergliechen. Take nothing for granted.

The second part consists of a single song in the piece, though there are barely three lines in the text. Keller's playing is exqusite, for this is a stage in the journey that must be savoured. The violin dominates, with a languid almost-melody that snakes round the voice. The Kafka Fragments aren't just a dialogue between voice and violin, but between two violins. Keller's primary instrument has a bright, positive timbre, while the second is warmer, more languid. Because Keller's playing is so subtle the difference is remarkable.

More musical puzzles. In the third section, violin and voice imitate other instruments. In Schmutzig bin ich, Milena, the violin sounds relatively conventional, imitating voice. The words refer to dirt and cleansing but that's deceptive. Most of this fragment is taken up by the image of voices in deepest hell. Specifically, what we take for the song of angels is the song of the doomed.  Later, Banse's voice sounds like a clarion bell,  or murmurs like an oboe, and the violin shimmers like an ethereal flute. The words Aufgewacht surface again. Pay attention, and to the underlying seams that course below.

The mood in part four changes again, taking up the languid stillness of part two. How Keller's violin seems to wail, as if in mourning.Then, suddenly he reverts to notes plucked at  spaced intervals, and awkward, angular scatterings in contrast to Banse's fluid lines. Part way he changes violins again, augmenting the disconcerting effect. Banse's voice swoops wildly : Leoparden brechen in der Tempel - what an image, hinting at some unknowable savagery. Yet immediately after, another Kurtág contradiction. "Ich kann.....(long pause) nicht eigentlich erzahlen" (I can't.....really tell a story). The hesitations in the intervals, and in the text underrline the idea that Fragments cannot tell a story. Proof, if any were needed, that Peter Sellars' staging of this work was an anti-musical abomination. Avoid it, even in audio, as the balance between voice and violin is all wrong. .

Kurtág ends equivocally. Wiederum, wiederum, round and round, like a circle. Banse's voice and Keller's violin twining round each other. But it's the final Fragment that opens out onto new vistas. Es bendetet uns die Mondnacht : moonlight casts spells, transforming daytime reality into something magical. Otherworldy sounds from the violin, part gypsy demonry, part Jewish lament. Banse's voice traces huge, expansive shapes that extend the idea of circles spreading outward. As her voice goes quiet, the ripples resonate endlessly into the void.

Perhaps this wasn't Banse and Keller's finest performance, for which I can't blame them. Half empty house and no composer in attendance. But it was a wonderful masterclass that showed why Kurtág's Kafka Fragments are so remarkable.And believe me, even  not at their best, Keller and Banse are way ahead of any competition.

Kurtág's Ghosts - Wigmore Hall

György Kurtág plays the sweeping glissandi in his Perpetuum Mobile. The page is marked with sweeping curves, not conventional notation. Yet the simplicity's deceptive - hear the humorous trill! This is one of the miniatures in Játékok, hence the whimsy and sense of cryptic allusion.  Music has to be fun to be creative. Paradoxically, real freedom comes from mastering technique and figuring what a composer's trying to do. This is the composer himself playing.

Last week I attended Julian Philips's Kurtág workshop at the Wigmore Hall. Anything Philips does is interesting. He's a composer and teacher of composition, so he knows what goes into the process of writing and performing  He's formidably knowledgeable yet also a fluent, natural communicator whose enthusiasm lights up whatever he's discussing. He's a worthy successor to the Wigmore Hall tradition forged by men like Graham Johnson and Eric Sams. If I could go to everything he does, I would. Last Wednesday's workshop was full of insight, and the audience were good too, asking real questions Two of Philips's doctoral students, Edward Pick and Rebecca Miles, played excerpts of Kurtág and one of Pick's own works. Nothing dumbed down here, utterly fascinating

I skipped workshop 2 on the social context  The best source on this subject is Rachel Beckles Willson whose two books on the subject HERE and HERE are absolutely indispensible.  If she'd been giving the workshop it would have been ideal as she knows the composer well.  Also read  Richard Steinitz's work on Ligeti.  There's a lot around on the subject.

But I will definitely not miss workshop 3 on Wed 9th. Rolf Hind will be there, talking about Kurtág as a person. Who a composer is does affect his music  and the way it's interpreted. We've been fortunate that Kurtág has often appeared in London and at Aldeburgh, but there's nothing like hearing someone like Rolf Hind who has worked with him. Kurtág is a charismatic person, but elusive.  I've seen him reduce a singer to tears because she couldn't manage his idiom.  Marta, his wife, broke in and admonished him. Marta and György are so close it's like watching symbiosis, even though they're each very individual. 

The workshops are followed by a concert, "Kurtág's Ghosts", with Marino Formenti, a bracing collage of fragments from Bach, Machaut, Boulez, Schumann, Stockhausen and Kurtág himself   The idea of playful montage is very Kurtág and reflects his thing for embedding references into his work. If you can't make it, there's a recording and an excerpt below. But there's nothing like being there live.  Connections! Connections! Pierre-Laurent Aimard , a keen adventurer in the field of collage-montage,, once said "You need to hear patterns", ie, how ideas adapt.  Don't forget, on 18th Feb Kurtág's Kafka Fragments. If you didn't like the Dawn Upshaw version at the Barbican, do not despair! Juliane Banse and Andras Keller are the real thing, the finest exponents of this masterpiece 

Wigmore Hall Festive Sale

Some VERY important concerts are included in the Wigmore Hall 10% discount offer on some concerts during January and February 2011

The Arditti Quartet are giving the London premiere of Brian Ferneyhough's String Quartet No 6. This is  MAJOR news and you can get in for £10.80. Ferneyhough is I think the greatest of living British composers (and a darn sight better than some dead ones) and the Arditti Quartet are his finest interpreters. If the Ferneyhough were not enough to make headlines, there are also three other new works by well established composers: Hilda Paredes, Dai Fujikura and James Clarke.

The other big news in February is the Wigmore Hall Kurtág series. There's a full price 3 day study workshop at the beginning of the month which includes a ticket to Marino Fomenti's concert on 9/2 which "combines Kurtág’s pieces with works from Beethoven, Bach and Schumann to Messiaen and Bartók." If you can't make the daytime workshops, tickets to this concert are discounted, which is a good idea. To understand a composer, understand his context.

The highlight of the Kurtág series will be Juliane Banse singing Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente with violinist András Keller. If you hated Dawn Upshaw and Peter Sellars' version of this work at the Barbican a while back, think again and hear Banse and Keller. Keller is to Kurtág what Arditti is to Ferneyhough. There just isn't anyone who knows the composer's idiom so intimately. Although there are at least 4 recordings of this seminally-important work, the one by Banse and Keller (1996) is the benchmark. It was made with Kurtág himself, advising in rehearsals and in the studio. Hear Banse and Keller and realize just how powerful this piece really can be, shorn of Sellars' silliness. Anyone remotely interested in 20th century music needs to hear Banse and Keller do this live.

Other recommendations in the WH's Festive Offer : Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace on 16th January, playing Korngold, Prokofiev and Frank Auberbach Preludes op 48. Unusual programme - worth catching. Piers Lane plays Schubert, Beethoven and Chopin on 24th.

February is even better. Boris Giltburg - Chopin, Prokofiev on 8/2. the Borodin Quartet play Myaskovsky's String Quartet no 3 op 86 which is getting cult status in some circles. Stéphane Degout sings an ambitious French recital on 10/2 which I'll go to - may be worth keeping an ear on him. And Midori, for whom I have a soft spot even though she's playing Brett Dean, for whom I don't.
This snow is nothing by Siberian standards  but I feel "snowed in". So over the next vfew days, I'll write about DVDs , CDs and books. Wagner Rienzi for example, fantastic !

György Kurtág Kafka Fragments London Upshaw Sellars

Can Haiku be improved by staging? György Kurtág's Kafka-Fragmente (op. 24), is a masterpiece of zen-like purity. ...... Forty brief quotes from Kafka’s diaries appear, many barely more than a sentence long. Meaning is elusive. “Die Weissnäherinnen in den Regengüssen” (washerwomen in downpours), for example, which is the entire text of song 9. Kurtág sets the words so they slide up and down the scale in strange, disoriented cadence, the violin part edgily racing beside the voice. What does the image mean? Is Kurtág illustrating the image or is he purposefully using it to hint at something wholly intangible?

Kurtág deliberately chose fragments because they are incomplete, and because they are fragile. They are existentialist utterances, beyond explanation. Meaning is distilled, intensely condensed like a homeopathic substance with power to expand in your soul. Most of Kurtág’s music is like this, highly polished miniatures to be carefully savoured on an intuitive level. Very zen, exquisitely beautiful.
But does something so esoteric need to be confined by concrete staging? Sellars interprets the Kafka Fragments with heavy handed literalism, seizing on brief references of purity and dirt to create a soap opera of domestic banality. Dawn Upshaw is seen sweeping, ironing, changing light bulbs and in one memorable image, with a plastic basket over her head. When Kafka remarks on concealment, is he being silly? In his pre-performance talk, Sellars told the audience that cleaning a bathroom was a great source of contemplation. Perhaps to him, but not to all. In his recent staging of Tristan und Isolde, Sellars also used elaborate projections of a long cleansing ritual which bore little relevance to the opera. Wagner as spa? Perhaps it’s a Sellars’ thing. In this case, the photographic projections were not by Bill Viola but by David Michalek, and even more distracting.

Kurtág needs staging, he added. To loosely paraphrase Sellars, “If you associate a song with a visual image, you can follow it”. Yet Kafka-Fragmente is only an hour long, less than many symphonies. Each fragment is so distinct that it’s really not hard to follow if you listen attentively. The danger is worrying too much about consuming what you see on the page, rather than absorbing the whole by listening on a more profound, oblique level.All performances involve interpretation. Even reading a score means personal input. But too literal a layer of expression obliterates without adding insight. Like haiku, Kurtág’s music is magical because it’s both elusive and utterly lucid at the same time, but treating it too literally defeats the whole purpose. This perhaps is why Sellars’ staging was so disappointing.

There were good moments where his images matched the music, such as the swaying movements in the first song, like the ticking of a clock. “Die Guten gehn im gleichen Schritt....die Tänze der Zeit” (The Good march in step...the Dances of Time). Yet many these fragments are evocative because they defy easy stereotypes. Forcing them into a narrative diminishes their power. When Kafka writes of pain, he doesn’t simply mean a woman pressing a hot iron into her face.

In principle, there’s nothing inherently wrong about staging music, particularly vocal music. Otherwise we wouldn’t have opera or ballet. But Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente work because they are beyond definition, their meaning deliberately open-ended and mysterious. It’s this freedom that makes aphoristic music so liberating. Kurtág explicitly connects to Anton Webern through the dedication to Pierre Boulez, Webern’s great champion. “The true path goes by way of a rope that is suspended” “Stolzen zu machen, als begangen zu werden”. (making you stumble rather than easily walk) Obliqueness, again, and contradiction. Very haiku. For Sellars the rope seems to imply suicide. Whether that’s valid or not, it means something different to Kurtág.

The Barbican Centre in London should be commended because it does innovative, daring work for contemporary music and opera. Last year they did Eötvös’s Angels in America, and Michael van der Aa’s After Life.  The Barbican has also staged several of Kaija Saariaho’s opera, for which Peter Sellars did excellent semi-stagings. These were successful because they encapsulated the essential drama in Saairaho’s diffuse, chromatic reveries. With Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente the opposite happens. In his pre-performance talk, Sellars gave many different explanations for his choices, a kitchen sink approach, perhaps in the hope that some of the ideas might work. If only he had absorbed the inner essence of Kurtág’s ethos, that less is more and that muzak isn’t music.

The benchmark recording of Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente is easily the one with Juliane Banse and András Keller, on ECM (2006). It is the keynote, as Keller has worked with Kurtág for many years and performed most of his work for violin. Indeed, the composer was involved in making the recording. High standards indeed, so it’s to Dawn Upshaw’s credit that her singing was up to the mark. She’s possibly the most experienced American singer in contemporary repertoire, and it showed in the way she negotiated Kurtág’s quirky lines and silences. Technically, Upshaw’s voice is more lustrous than Banse’s but the setting let her down.

 ...... for me it felt like seeing some great classic of European or Japanese art cinema remade for daytime TV.

Please see the full review in Opera Today with extra links. 

Coming up this week

Coming up soon on this site : György Kurtág Kafka Fragements, a preview of Alexander Raskatov's A Dog's Heart, Franz Schreker Irrelohe and at last the second CD of Ma Sicong Music for Violin and Piano. which has been top of my listening list for months. So beautiful that I haven't been able to write well enough to do it justice. Strange, how the more you love something the harder it is to fully express.

Which is why I've been slower than usual about writing up Kurtág Kafka Fragements, at the Barbican Hall with Dawn Upshaw. This is a piece I care about passionately. It's radical because it presents a different listening experience, where the music "happens" when ideas connect on a deep level in the listener's psyche. Maybe that's what happens with all music, but more so with Kurtág's extreme concision. Ideas distilled into homeopathic intensity that expand in your soul. Peter Sellars' staging, on the other hand, ignores Kurtág's whole concept. Thanks to Sellars, now Kurtág undergoes the equivalent of what would happen to European and Japanese art cinema if it were remade for daytime TV soaps. Full review coming up in Opera Today.

This is particularly tragic because the Barbican has been doing wonderful things for contemporary music and opera. Last year they did Eötvös's Angels in America, and Michael van der Aa's After Life. This is courageous programming, for which the Barbican deserves praise, particularly as the South Bank has lost its vision. In the past they've done the Saariaho operas, which Peter Sellars' semi staging did wonders for, even if his Kurtág was a self-indulgent misreading. Starting soon, the Barbican's continuing its acclaimed series of baroque opera, with Handel's Alcina. This is important because Barbican baroque choices are very good indeed. Definitely one of the hippest venues in London.

At the ENO, Simon McBurney's Raskatov A Dog's Heart looks extremely interesting. Anything premiered at The Holland Festival is likely to be challenging, so we're lucky that the ENO has brought this over. Fascinating concept, executed by Complicite, one of the finest modern drama ensembles around. This is serious drama, real music theatre people, as opposed to directors moonlighting from elsewhere. I've seen clips and read up on it - this should be exciting. Please come back to this site as I'll be writing lots. And get to the show, which starts 20th.

And of course Francesco Cilea Adriana Lecouvreur at the Royal Opera House Thursday. When this was done at another venue two years ago some of my friends adored it (others said it was toffee).  I missed it then, but heard it on BBC Radio 3. So I can't miss it now with a megastar cast. Angela Gheorghiu, Alessandro Corbelli, and Jonas Kaufmann in a role that should suit him well.

Kurtag, Aimard and Bach, Aldeburgh

Aldeburgh Festival 2008 (4 and 5): Bach, Kurtág György Kurtág, Márta Kurtág, (piano), Hiromi Kikuchi (violin), Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano), The Maltings, Snape, Aldeburgh. 19 and 20.06.2008 (AO)

“He writes mathematically, in the way Bach writes mathematically, but with great emotion”, said Philip Langridge recently about Harrison Birtwistle, but much the same applies too, to György Kurtág, whose music is even more precise and aphoristic. This pair of concerts placed Bach and Kurtág in beautiful counterpoise. Birtwistle’s transcriptions of Bach will be heard on 27th June. Aldeburgh programming is elegant in the way good mathematics can be elegant.

Kurtág’s HiPartita for solo violin might sound nothing like Bach at first, yet it has the purity we associate with Bach. It was written specially for Hiromi Kikuchi, and has become her signature. She’s played it so often that it seems to flow out of her like a natural force. I heard her play it in November 2006, also with the Kurtàg’s in attendance. Yet it’s not an easy piece. Kurtág sets challenges in each of the eight movements. Many different techniques are used. One moment Kikuchi does an exporessive ”Paganini” flourish, the next she’s making barely audible, growling, rustling whispers scraping bow against wood. The score is spread out over eleven stands on the platform, and Kikuchi moves between them as she plays. This highlights the unity behind the different parts. One section is called Orebasìa, an ancient Greek ceremonial procession. Another is......perpetuum mobile..... Thus HiPartita functions as nonstop movement, which shifts and changes, but stays afloat, as if Kikuchi were juggling balls in the air. In many ways it’s akin to the Ligeti Piano Concerto which famously is supposed to levitate like a helicopter when played well. (See review) HiPartita is also a solo instrument precursor to Kurtág’s Six moments musicaux for string quartet, which is almost a symphony by Kurtág standards, where disparate movements are balanced in almost classical unity. It would be interesting to hear them together one day.

György and Márta Kurtág had been sitting in the audience during earlier concerts, unnoticed by many, but this was their turn on stage. Márta is a very good pianist indeed, but the reason it’s so important to hear the Kurtágs play is because their performance embodies a lot about the Kurtág ethos of simplicity and understatement. They sit before a humble upright piano, just as if they were at home, in private, playing for their own enjoyment. One key to appreciating Kurtág’s miniatures is to understand how personal and intimate they are. Hence, no grand concert piano, and backs to the audience. This is private music, which listeners can join in as part of the family, so to speak. The Játékok series contains many small pieces written over a 23 year period. The idea of music as a formal, monumental structure doesn’t apply. Játékok means ”games”. Kurtág is playing with new ideas, letting the pieces fall together in different ways, like a child playing with building bricks. The extracts chosen for this performance were nicely varied. Sometimes both played in a straightforward duo fashion. Sometimes their arms cross diagonally so each is playing at the opposite end of the keyboard. Among the selections tonight were hree Bach transcriptions, balanced by canons and the Apocryphal hymn in the style of Alfred Schnitttke. Kurtág is playing with things familiar in unfamiliar ways, but always with a sense of proportion and scale. The sounds are Kurtág, but the spirit isn’t so very far from Bach.

Die Kunst der Fuge was created for private exploration : Bach, like Kurtág, ”playing” with ideas on his keyboard, away from public pressure and expectations. As Aimard says in an interview with Marc Ernesti, it is ”a demanding piece, it is not pleasant, not ’effectful’, not a commercialised showpiece”. Like Játékok it’s not meant for flashy surface display. Thus, for his imtriguing concert, the following evening, Aimard chose 12 of the Contrapunctus segments from Die Kunst der Fuge and interleaved them with carefully chosen extracts from Játékok Aimard says”The Kurtág pieces open up a symmetry in the music similar to the rectus and inversus in Bach, almost like a mirror game”. He puts the fanfare in Contrapuntus with the fanfare in Játékok’s For Dòra, and places the Játékok Hommage à Paganini between Contrapunctus X and IX. Aimard also included Fuga a 3 Soggeti. Heard with Kurtàg, the unfinished character of the piece sound remarkably open ended and modern, like a Kurtàg fragment. The selection was so well planned that it’s probably worth reproducing at home to better appreciate what the combinations highlight. Aimard has recently recorded Die Kunst der Fuge for Deutsche Grammophon, and the whole concert is being broadcast on BBC Radio3 on 27th June, and for a week online and on demand. The concert played by the Kurtàg’s is being broadcast on 28th June and will also be online for a week. There should be no excuses for not listening !

http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2008/Jan-Jun08/aldeburgh2006.htm

Ives's Unanswered Question, Aldeburgh

Saturday night I was at a concert with an interesting programme :

Haydn : Symphony no 22 "The Philosopher"
Schoenberg : Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra
Kurtág : Doodles for András Mihály´s Birthday, Ligatura - message to Frances-Marie (also known as The Answered Unanswered Question)
Webern : Fünf Sätze, (Five Movements for String Quartet)
Ives : The Unanswered Question
Mozart: Piano Concerto No 26 "The Coronation"

Haha ! Try this one at home and see why it is so interesting. It operates on many levels - celebration music, the idea of play, experiment, aphorism, questions, dialogue etc. Lots to get from it that might not catch the ear on a single hearing.

The "obvious" cliche there is that it's mixing Mozart and Haydn with Kurtag, Ives etc. But it's not nearly as simple as that. Note the Mozart and Haydn pieces, not big, famous blockbusters but pieces which are fairly open ended. The Mozart for example allows for extended improvisation and isn't "complete" in the formal sense. And the Haydn is a kind of exploration of the possibilites of symphonic form. So, "old" as they may be they are "new" in spirit, (and were new music in their time).

Then the Kurtag, Webern and Schoenberg miniatures, each concise explorations....played without a break, then Ives The Unanswered Question. It's was wonderful to hear Ives framed in this way, a kind of "coronation". This was a very high profile concert indeed, the first real music concert of the current Aldeburgh Festival.

Aldeburgh is unique. It was founded by Benjamin Britten but is definitely not a Britten exclusive. On the contrary. Look it up on google for an idea of what they do. All kinds of people come tho' it's way out in the country and hard to reach without a car. (In England lots of people don't drive). Lots of serious music folks from Europe and also lots of ordinary local people for whom it's the main event of the year. It's an excellent mix for exactly that reason. For me it was wonderful to hear what the locals thought of Ives. In this context they seemed to immediately "get" where Ives was coming from, it was a joy to hear how thrilled they were. These days, there's a lot of nonsense about atonality "having" to be difficult and impossible. People swallow the myth and switch off. Instead here they were just presented with Ives on his own terms, and no prejudices at all !

Before the concert someone asked Aimard who conducted, "Will Schoenberg ever be popular". If the guy was expecting Aimard to sneer at Schoenberg, he was wrong. Aimard said "Why should anyone HAVE to be popular?" It's more important that composers have integrity and ask the questions than pander to "popular" values. And this audience proved that ordinary people can respond, given a chance.