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A guide to Gyrgy Kurtg's music

In Kurtg's tiny fragments lies music of unflinching emotional and existential rawness
Tom Service
Tuesday 12 March 2013 10.13GMT

Watch this. A couple in their mid-80s, married for 65 years, play the piano. Their hands
the skin of which is smooth, shiny and unwrinkled, as if washed clean rather than
marked by the decades don't so much play the keyboard as conjure sounds from it.
Their playing dissolves the difference between them and the instrument, and between
each other. Their arms criss-cross, as if their four hands make a single composite player;
their gestures, their open-mouthed wonder at and commitment to the music (a sequence
of pieces by the husband, and transcriptions of Bach), and their smiles to each other, are
touchingly similar. They even look alike, with their glasses and short grey hair, their
posture at the piano. What you're seeing is private, intimate music-making raised to the
level of a joyous miracle. It's one of the treasures of 20th- and 21st-century music.
Hungarian composer, pianist, and teacher Gyrgy Kurtg and his wife Marta have been
playing Kurtg's Jatekok (Games) for the past 40 years, and that ever-expanding set of
pieces is just one of the laboratories in which Kurtg has conducted his experiments in
the search for musical truth. It's a compositional journey that has often involved
reducing music to the level of the fragment, the moment, with individual pieces or
movements lasting mere seconds, or a minute, perhaps two. In fact, Kurtg builds whole
cycles of pieces from these small shards, like his blistering Kafka-Fragments for violin
and soprano, a 40-movement song-cycle of unflinching emotional and existential
rawness, or the 12 Microludes for String Quartet, each a shred of pure musical extremity:
violence or stasis, complexity or simplicity. Kurtg's apparent obsession with this
smallness of time-scale isn't some kind of post-Webernian quest to split the musical
atom or to find the structural essence of music. Far from a "reduction", Kurtg's
fragments are about musical and, above all, expressive intensification: maximising the
effect and impact of every note, every gesture. Listen to any of the Kafka-Fragments to
hear what I mean.
Despite their brevity, these tiny pieces are not incomplete as experiences. Take, for
example, the seven notes of Flowers We Are, Mere Flowers ( embracing sounds)
whose title takes almost as long to read as the piece does to hear part of the 8th book of
Jatekok. (You hear it from 4'10'' into the Kurtgs' performance.) Kurtg precedes the
piece with a prelude of nine tolling B flats; the seven notes of Flowers We Are follow.
What you hear are the notes of the C major scale turned into a meditation for four hands.
There is nothing more familiar than these elements, but nothing stranger than what
happens to them throughout this performance. Paradoxically, precisely because of its
conciseness, the piece becomes static and timeless; and those notes, far from meaning
anything like "C major" or "tonality" are unmoored from conventional function and
allowed to resound and shimmer in a much larger musical space. Hearing Flowers We
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Are is like opening a trapdoor in your floor and dropping for a moment into the
infinity of the cosmos.
That kind of intensity is something that Kurtg is always looking to create. Often, that's
about an expressive or expressionistic violence (hear The Saying of Peter Bornemisza for
soprano and piano, or the Messages of the Late Miss RV Troussova for soprano and
ensemble to experience some of Kurtg's most emotionally shattering music), but it's
just as often about wresting images of beauty and solace from a world of darkness. Some
of Kurtg's most beautiful pieces are the ones he has composed as memorials for friends
or musicians. They are often pieces that use that paradoxical power of the fragment to
suggest a timelessness or spaciousness, for example In Memoriam Andras Mihaly,
another of the Jatekok.
The detail of Kurtg's compositional imagination is matched by the inspirational and
sometimes forbidding fastidiousness of his teaching of the whole repertoire of classical
chamber music and his coaching of his own music. His near-perennial state of
dissatisfaction with performers is the stuff of legend among musicians, but so too is the
brilliance of his insight and wisdom. And any frustration with his interpreters is matched
by a much deeper and more lacerating strain of self-criticism: "I never hear my ideas
properly ... No one can hear it There's nothing to be done I felt I couldn't go on, I
mustn't go on " just some of the Beckettian aphorisms that stud his interviews with
Balint Andras Varga. (A mirror image can be found in his unconditional admiration for
the music of his friend Gyrgy Ligeti, whom he first met in 1945: "I love this music
from the bottom of my heart, which resounds in Atmosphres as if it welled up inside
me, which shakes me so in the Dies Irae [of Ligeti's Requiem], which lifts me on high in
the violin concerto.")
Kurtg's music for orchestra has embraced a larger scale in pieces such as Stele,
composed for the Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado, and concertante for
violin, viola, and orchestra. The three-movement Stele is memorial music that is
nonetheless filled with a strange luminescence: the reverberating chordal repetitions in
the final movement sound like the tolling of funeral bells (or perhaps the breathing of
alien life forms). The first movement is an adagio, an implacable lament that ends with a
homage to Bruckner in a passage for four Wagner tubas. But the second movement has
the most scintillating moment of all. In the middle of the music's desperate violence,
there is a sudden image of strange stillness, a sound made by six flutes, a tuba, and a
piano. Kurtg said he wanted the effect to be like "the scene in Tolstoy's War and Peace
where Prince Andrei is wounded at Austerlitz for the first time: all of a sudden, he no
longer hears the battle but discovers the blue sky above him. That is what the music
conjures up." He continues, lamenting that, "I keep telling this story and no one
responds." But they do, Gyrgy! If you are open to it, the devastating poetry of Stele can
sear itself on your soul.
This can only give you a small slice of Kurtg's world. Ever since the piece he thinks of as
his opus 1, a string quartet written in 1959 after a year of psychoanalytic soul-searching
in Paris, Kurtg has composed a huge catalogue that resonates with the music of the past
he loves most Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Bartk, Webern. It also speaks
with a fearless directness that bypasses musical tradition and becomes its own idiom.
When you hear it in a performance such as the Kurtgs' own, his work creates a world of
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apparently unmediated feeling. It is full of the joys and despairs of life, which you can
see, etched in the faces of Gyrgy and Marta as they play.

Five key links

Jatekok in performance by the Kurtgs
Stele
12 Microludes
Messages of the Late Miss RV Troussova
concertante

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