Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner NYC piano debut by Gyorgy Kurtag, his wife and son

The three Kurtags made their piano debut in NYC yesterday playing works by the composer. Perhaps someone can post the interesting review of the concert in today's NY Times.

Particularly interesting to me was their performance of some Bach transcriptions(by Kurtag?), on an upright played with the soft pedal down(why?), and with the son adjusting the amplification(?)measure by measure during each piece.

Anyone familiar with this composer's works?

I performed several selections from Kurtag's Jatekok (which is a sort of contemporary Mikrokosmos) some years back. Fascinating composer. Hopefully I'll get a chance to listen to some of his larger scale compositions.

Composer/pianist Thomas Ades recorded some selections from Jatekok in this CD.

Anyone interested can read the review here .

(Is linking and/or cutting and pasting that difficult?!?!?).

I think you have to register to read a lot of the articles in NYT in full, so a link doesn't help a lot of people. Not sure if that's still the case, but in the past people have posted links, and gotten the response that others cannot access the linked article.

Also, it could be that pianoloverus read the print edition, but isn't registered himself to NYT online.

I think that they loosened up the registration restrictions quite a lot recently, although I could be wrong. I finally broke down and registered years ago. But if the link that Janus pasted does not work for anyone, the old trick was to add ?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all directly to the end of it (or any other Times url that is problematic):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/arts/music/04kurt.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Or as the Times put it, "The haunting, enigmatic sounds and unusual sonorities that floated through the hall (in striking contrast to the bright, powerful timbre of most concert grands)..." No kidding. I don't know anything about these folks, but there are a few tidbits here (scroll down):

"The upright piano is not the instrument of concert halls, but that of children learning to play. My father has composed on this instrument muted with supersordino (as he called it) for many years, and has grown so fond of its incomparable, silky tone, that he started to practise on it the four-hand concert programme he plays with my mother. The plan to substitute this instrument for a concert piano in a concert hall was realised in 2006 at the 85th birthday concert for composer András Szőllősy. That was the first time I amplified the upright piano. The initially static settings were later followed by several interventions, each supporting the spirit of the given piece. In the piece In Memoriam András Mihály I created the sense of an orchestral crescendo on an instrument that has a minimal dynamic range. This was only possible if the amplification was not static, but followed the performer’s intentions from note to note. Thus a new concert instrument was born, of which only the long resonance and dying away of chords and the full-bodiedness of the lowest register betrays the fact that the instrument on stage is not a student instrument."

So the son/composer spends the performance fiddling with the amp, it would seem...

Yes that's the reason.

Kurtag is a very interesting composer. He started of in the late 1940s composing in one style (the style of these early works is unknown to me). After studying with Milhaud and Messiaen in the 1950s he made a complete turn, abandoned all his earlier works and reset his opus numbers. Thus his string quartet written in 1959 became opus 1.

He's known for writing very short and structurally dense works. For example his 12 microludes for string quartet have a total duration of only 9 minutes. As part of an analysis class we looked through these microludes and they were very tightly structured. There seemed to be a logical explanation to every single note, rhythm and articulation, nothing was left to chance.