Paul Griffiths

Games as Earnest

Kurtág 80: A Five-Day Celebration, February 15- 19, 2006

 

It was a celebration. It was a celebration of a great composer with us- György Kurtág at eighty- and it was therefore, Kurtág being Kurtág, necessarily a cele- bration that leaned into the shadows, concluding on the birthday evening, February 19th, with Songs of Despair and Sorrow, the composer's series of choral exhalations on Russian poems. But, yes, despair and sorrow can become celebra- tion- the celebration of a life lived in clarity and care. That birthday concert was the last of four consecutive evenings devoted to Kurtág's music and demonstrat- ing how his pessimism is balanced and varied by playfulness and humour- demonstrating, too, how a bleak vision, accurately and incisively expressed, attains the splendour of justness. What was also demonstrated was how much Kurtág's scores are prescriptions for performance, drawing musicians into endeavours that are themselves celebratory, as communal achievements.
Special in every way was the performance that ended the first of three pro- grammes of chamber music, all given in the Festival Theatre at the Palace of Arts. The musicians were the Keller Quartet, who have grown up with Kurtág- the composer and the coach- as their guide. The piece was his most recently com- pleted composition, Six Moments musicaux, Op.44, which had been used as a suite of test pieces at the quartet competition in Bordeaux last year but had not been presented together before. The music was thrillingly alive. This is a medium in which Kurtág is thoroughly at home; he speaks quartettish as his native lan- guage, writing always eloquently with the soft pencil of quartet sounds- a pencil that can be pressed hard to make lines of glistening intensity or barely brushed across the paper, leaving trails like smoke. Here he was doing so again, creating a work that counts as his fourth string quartet, after his Op.1, the Microludes and the Officium breve. With the Kellers at a high pitch of sensitivity and only the venue amiss (its amplification, perhaps used in an effort to count-er the persistent noise of lights or air conditioning, giving everything a synthetic glaze), one had the cer-tainty of witnessing the arrival of a classic. Like other recent compositions of Kurtág's- for wind instruments (Játékok és üzenetek, or Games and Messages), for solo violin (Hipartita) and for orchestra (Üzenetek and Új üzenetek, or Messages and New Messages)- the Six Moments musicaux are composed largely, perhaps entirely, from material he has generated before, most often in his long-running Játékok for piano. The finale of the quartet, for instance, is 'Les Adieux- in Janácek's Manier', an item from the seventh book of Játékok that has also found its way into New Messages. To the quartet it brings a moving close. When, at the very end, the second violin, viola and cello seem to retreat into the distance, András Keller, the leader, was left in this premiere performance as if looking out to the front, away from them, abandoned. But then, in response to the audience reception, the players repeated this movement and the feeling was quite different. Now Keller appeared to have turned in the final moments, and in his last phrase to be watching his collagues go, resigned and with them in spirit. Later the same evening the Kellers were splendid again, in interludes by Kurtág given within a performance by the A:N:S Chorus of Obrecht's 'Maria zart' mass, including a piece that ended transcendentally with winding, high, muted melodies.

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Paul Griffiths
is the author of books on Stravinsky, Bartók, the string quartet and, most recenty, of The Penguin Companion to Classical Music (2004).