Customer Reviews

Kurtag: Jatekok / Marta and Gyorgy Kurtag

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This is one of my favorite piano music recordings. Kurtag's piano pieces, each dedicated to a friend or hero, are like miniature musical portraits composed by a master artist. They are tiny, intricate, and gestural. His music tends toward the aphoristic, saying a lot with very few notes. Some pieces are less than a minute long. And yet they have the feel of the eternal about them. The sound is beautiful.

This is one of the finest CDs of contemporary piano music I have ever heard. The music is spare, fragmented, and frequently "empty" -- not empty of content, but empty in the way the Grand Canyon is empty. Not knowing very much about Zen I will still venture to say that Kurtag's music has Zen-like qualities of intense concentration, absence of ornamentation for it own sake, quietude, rigorousness, micro- and macro-scopic examination of its subject, seriousness offset with moments of whimsy, and even, though how I know this I don't know, morality. Not prudery, but real morality. This is music that grapples, as much as music ever can, with the Big Problems. Death, love, loyalty and rememberance are frequent themes. There is a deeply religious, almost monastic, quality to much of the music. It is therefore perfectly fitting that the recording is held up by four columns -- four transcriptions of Bach chorales, at least two of which are among the finest transcriptions of these much transcribed works as I have ever heard (easily in a class with Busoni, Kempff and Hess). For Bach lovers alone this is a great recording to have. Ditto for lovers of contemporary music. For Bach lovers who also love contemporary music, this is an essential recording -- not to be missed. Outstanding in every respect.

György Kurtág keeps us guessing and entertained with his ingenious thoughts about music in our time. This marvelous CD is devoted to his piano music and both the composer and his wife Marta Kurtág perform these very brief encounters with sound in a manner in which they are aptly called 'Games'. Among the sequences are brief homages to Stravinsky, Scarlatti, Ligeti, Farkas Ferenc as well as moments of variations on Bach chorales. The placement of these pieces is well conceived: there are I believe 8 books of these 'Games' and in some ways they are similar to Béla Bartók's 'Mikrokosmos', except instead of leading the pianist (and listener) through pieces requiring progressive virtuosity, they instead must lead the player's ear through more and more advanced manipulation of sounds and silences.

Some of the pieces are a matter of a few notes, others hammer the keyboard in percussive strokes, some pieces are homages to Marta and are played by the dedicatee alone. Just when the listener thinks there can not more creativity available from Kurtág he and his wife break into another immaculate transcription of Bach to let the palette settle. This is a satisfying program in every way. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, September 10

This disc where Gyorgy Kurtag and his wife Marta performs his "Jatekok" piano pieces and Bach transcriptions, either alternating in the solo works or playing together four-hands, is one of the little gems of the label ECM New Series. The listener reading the liner notes will be confounded at the amount of tracks on the disc, for Kurtag's music consists mainly of miniatures. How is one supposed to properly absorb all these pieces, you might wonder. Well, just sit back and treat this disc as the recital it is.

The disc opens with "Virag az ember", the motto of the "Jatekok" cycle. It consists only of eight notes, but makes a complete musical statement with its resolution of dissonance and ending on the tonic B-flat. When performed four-hands by the Kurtags, the hands cross, emphasizing in a heartwarming fashion that this is a couple still deeply in love after so many decades. This is followed by the sublime tones of Bach's chorale "Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir" BWV 687. Then we move into the main body of the recital.

The "Jatekok" cycle began as instructional pieces for children, intended more to allow them to discover the piano for themselves than go through traditional drills. In the course of several books over four decades, however, it has grown to include a great many more substantial pieces, often hommages to acquaintances of the composer. Kurtag's music is never Darmstadt abstraction, but it can be knotty, and there are even some moments of conflict like the amusing "musical quarrel" that the Kurtags play together with all their experience of a couple's loving bickering. The Bach transcriptions, on the other hand, bring a sense of heavenly piece in between the more earthly "Jatekok" pieces.

If you build up a collection of Kurtag recordings and memorabilia, you'll soon recognize the various individual Jatekok pieces, as they show up in a lot of places. This is thus a disc to come back to again and again as you explore this great composer's output. Perhaps a better introduction to Kurtag's music for the complete beginning is his string quartets, but you're unlikely to be disappointed if you pick up this ECM release soon after.

This CD presents composer György Kurtág and his wife Márta playing selections from his sketches for piano, Játékok ("Games") plus some transcriptions for 4-hand piano of some works by Bach. The mixture of Bach's noble and stately melodies and counterpoint along with the wispy, elliptical, playful fragments by Kurtág brings out the best of both composers, and shows what a wide range of expression is possible on a piano even without resorting to the rich harmonies and lush chords featured in Romantic music. This music is spare and fleeting, but colorful in its own way, colorful in what it suggestively points to rather than by what it figuratively represents. This is not a CD for everyone, but the pianistically adventurous will be plentifully rewarded should they seek it out.

Kurtag has a very precise sense of what he hears but is often at a loss to find an effective means of notation (the Jatekok pieces with their flimsy notation are a good example)and then has fierce confrontions with players when they don't realise his intentions.
For all this shoddy behaviour, the results aren't without an appeal,somehow transcending (only just)being a mere sketch.Most moving are the Bach transcriptions which are beautifully delivered by the fearsome duo of kurtag with his wife.They emerge seamlessley from the Jatekok.