If any contemporary composer can persuade the musical world that compositions of between 30 seconds and four minutes in length are the natural vehicle for progressive post-tonal music, and therefore for the music of the future, that composer is Gyorgy Kurtag. It’s an indication of the strength of traditional aesthetic values that we still refer to such works as ‘miniatures’, a label that always implies some degree of superficiality, as if a truly profound experience can only be had from unbroken structures of far greater length. In reality, of course, many large-scale post-tonal works are simply too long: but that’s another story. The point of this one is that this sequence of compositions by Kurtag, the longest of which lasts just over five minutes, offers a very special experience – as memorable and as profound as any to be had from new music today.
The disc contains a selection from Kurtag’s ongoing sequence of ‘games’ (Jatekok) for solo piano and piano duet. They are a mixture of studies and tributes, not explicitly pedagogic in Mikrokosmos mode, but ranging widely in technical demands and style, from fugitive fragments, in which even the smallest element tells, to the extraordinary flamboyance of a Perpetuum mobile containing nothing but glissandos.
Most are sombre in tone, and even the more humorous items, like the furiously constrained “Beating – Quarrelling”, have a bitter side to them. For access to another musical world, Kurtag has included four of his Bach transcriptions, music whose serenity and confidence speaks immediately of utter remoteness from the real present. Yet there is no nostalgia: Bach was then, Kurtag is now.
The performances risk over-projection, as if the Kurtags were unwilling to make allowances for the intimacy enforced by the all-hearing microphone, but they are supremely characterful, and the close-up recording reinforces the impression of music that is mesmerically persuasive in its imagination and expressiveness. If only even more of these pieces had been included!'