Solitary Islands. New Releases by BMC: Kurtág, Ligeti and Liszt
Solitary Islands. New Releases by BMC: Kurtág, Ligeti and Liszt

Summary/Abstract: Aclutch of recent releases from Budapest Music Center includes a first chance for most of us to hear something from György Kurtág’s ninth decade. Famously hesitant in earlier years —when he turned fifty his catalogue did not extend beyond Op. 12—Kurtág has been accelerating with age. Lately there have been Brefs messages for nine players (his Op. 47) as well as smaller instrumental pieces, all emerging in the interstices of a long delayed opera: a setting of Beckett’s Fin de partie. The composition on the new disc (BMC CD 162) is Four Poems by Anna Akhmatova, which he set for soprano and ensemble as his Op. 41, a score he finished in 2008 for a première in New York on January 31, 2009—and it is this first performance that is recorded here, along with other pieces from the concert, given in the Zankel auditorium of Carnegie Hall: Kurtág’s Troussova, and his friend Ligeti’s Melodien and Cello Concerto. (The programme also included a third work by each composer: Kurtág’s Splinters and Ligeti’s With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles.) Péter Eötvös conducts the UMZE Ensemble, with Miklós Perényi in the Ligeti concerto and Natalia Zagorinskaya in both Troussova and the new cycle, which Kurtág dedicated to her. One hardly needs to hear Troussova on the same album to recognize that the Akhmatova songs come from a different Kurtág—in terms of the smoothness of the vocal line and the centredness of the harmony, with a lot of motivic repetition and strong hints of folksong modalities—but also from very much the same composer, where the immediacy of expression and the almost tastable instrumental colours are concerned.

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