CD, стоящие на полке рядом : Classics (Modern Classics)      

Recorded: February / March 2002

Gyorgy Kurtag's Late Works (booklet)

With Orlando Trio

Years have passed since Gyorgy Kurtag's last ECM recording, which incorporated his "Jatekok (Games)" and "Bach Transcriptions", made with Kurtag and wife Marta playing piano together.

The birth of this newest album has been an arduous one, with the composer intensely and meticulously involved at every step of the way. And if "Games" are at the centre of this recording, too, they are often life-and-death games - echoing the endgame humours of Samuel Beckett's universe and the anguish of Holderlin - in a programme in which two song cycles are bridged by the "Signs, Games and Messages" for strings. (As England's The Independent has observed, "Gyorgy Kurtag never writes a note lacking musical intent, and never writes a note with which he has not lived and suffered.") "Kurtag's described all three cycles as "Works In Progress" and their formal boundaries are particularly fluid, even within the context of an oeuvre in which labyrinths of connecting threads (musical, literary, philosophical, epistolary) have become the norm.

Kurtag has consistently revised these works, reordered the movements, added new movements, set others aside, both for concert performances and in the realization of this album. Although "Signs, Games and Messages" includes among its numerous dedicatees an "Hommage a John Cage", the tight control that Kurtag exerts over every grain of sound, every gesture, sigh and silence, makes his work the converse of "indeterminate". And yet the way the pieces move, as chains of interlinked miniatures (only one of the 59 tracks here has a duration of more than three minutes), conveys a sense of living tissue as well as an "improvisational" freshness. "A whole world of expression and suggestion" is indeed "packed into these exquisite, crystalline forms" (The Guardian).

The album begins with six sections from the "Holderlin-Gesange" primarily for solo baritone, whose solitude is broken in one section ("Gestalt und Geist") by the arrival - in this version - of trombone and tuba. As Thomas Bosche notes in the CD booklet: "Various attempts have been made to describe Kurtag's handling of literary texts, for there is a secret here that is difficult to decode. In his settings, Kurtag penetrates deep into the often hermetic texts and arrives at a clarity and simplicity born of that depth. Kurtag's world - as Walter Benjamin said of Franz Kafka - is the theatre of life. The poetic utterance is transformed into musical gestures and positioned on an imaginary stage. With hubris - ruinous human arrogance - as a central motif in Holderlin's late work, and equally in Kurtag's settings, the fortissimo outburst of "Verwegner! mochtest von Angesicht zu Angesicht/ Die Seele sehn" ?"Reckless! wanting to see the soul/ Face to face"? in "Gestalt und Geist" becomes the cycle's centre of gravity." Concluding the "Holderlin-Gesange" is a setting of Paul Celan's famous "Tubingen, Janner" which the poet wrote after visiting the town where Holderlin spent the final years of his life.

"...pas a pas - nulle part" is a set of 22 Samuel Beckett poems plus Beckett translations of the maxims of Sebastien Chamfort (1712-1794), a pioneering misanthropic aphorist whose caustic wit was predestined to strike a chord with the expatriate Irishman. As for Beckett and Kurtag, the Hungarian composer fell under the dramatist's spell in 1957 when a performance of "Endgame" in Paris seemed to address his own existential despair. Of course these artists share both bleakness and humanity as well an acute sense of the futility and the necessity of artistic utterance in troubled times. The Kurtag settings are of poems Beckett wrote in French and published in 1978 under the title "Mirlintonnades". Jotted down originally on scraps of paper, backs of envelopes, beer mats and whiskey bottle labels, the function of this "French doggerel" - to quote Beckett - was to keep despondency at bay in everyday life.

Thomas Bosche: "On the occasion of Gyorgy Kurtag's seventieth birthday, Hungarian author Gyorgy Dalos was more than justified in asking: how can a composer who has concentrated exclusively on the essentials throughout his career possibly arrive at a late style marked by greater concentration and attention to the essentials. That even more intense concentration and radicalisation of what has always been inherent to Kurtag's work is possible becomes eminently clear in the composer's Holderlin and Beckett settings. If ever justice has been done to Arnold Schoenberg's dictum that music should not be decorative, but truthful, then it is here, where differentiation and intimacy are coupled with outward austerity."

Of "Signs, Games and Messages" itself, music historian and former Kurtag pupil Rachel Beckles Willson has written: "One can hardly call this work a 'string trio': it is more like a conversation between three players, a conversation which sometimes attains synthesis and is sometimes dysfunctional or abstruse. The movements are short. They were often composed in one sweep on a single afternoon, in response to news, a mood or a thought. In their resultant abundance they can have been compared to diary entries."

***

The most exacting of composers, Gyorgy Kurtag asks a great deal of his interpreters. Performance of the pieces on the Signs, Games and Messages CD requires both rigorous discipline and selflessness, and Kurt Widmer, Mircea Ardeleanu and the Orlando Trio give everything to this project.

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