The first new album by Kurtág in six years is a major event. Kurtág was always a master of the miniature – no tone or texture, no grain of sound is wasted – but now his work is more concentrated than ever. The work on “Signs, Games and Messages” represents a pinnacle of Kurtág’s art of achieving the ultimate in expression by the most minimal of means. The album is comprised of settings of Hölderlin (and Paul Celan) in the “Hölderlin-Gesänge”, sung by Kurt Widmer, and of Beckett (and Sébastien Chamfort) in “ … pas à pas – nulle part …”, sung by Widmer with string trio and percussion. The two song cycles are linked by the work-in-progress that gives the album its title: “Signs, Games and Messages” for strings. The three cycles recorded here – and to which the distinguished interpreters gave years of intense collaboration – comprise between them a total of 59 tracks, only one of which goes beyond three minutes in duration. More than any composer before him, Kurtág has mastered the art of the expressive musical aphorism – or, as he self-deprecatingly puts it, “making music out of almost nothing.” But as England’s The Guardian said, “A whole world of expression and suggestion can be packed into these exquisite, crystalline forms.”
György Kurtág: Signs, Games and Messages - Friedrich Hölderlin / Samuel Beckett
Kurt Widmer, Orlando Trio, Mircea Ardeleanu
- Hölderlin-Gesänge op. 35a
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- 2Im Walde - für Georg Kröll01:23
- 3Gestalt und Geist col trombone e tuba - hommage à Alexander Polzin01:26
- 4An Zimmern - für Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus01:54
- 5Der Spaziergang - für Heinz Holliger02:42
- 6Paul Celan: Tübingen, Jänner - Robert klein in Erinnerung01:35
- Signs, Games & Messages
- 7Virág az ember, Mijakónak
01:31 - 8Im Volkston (Népdalféle) - Horváth Juditnak
00:55 - 9Hommage à J.S.B.
01:16 - 10Zank - Kromatisch
01:08 - 11The Carenta Jig
00:49 - 12Ligatura Y
02:50 - 13Jelek (Signs) I - Székács Jánosnak
00:50 - 14Jelek (Signs) II - Székács Jánosnak
00:36 - 15Klagendes Lied (Panaszos nóta)
02:12 - 16Jelek (Signs) III
00:47 - 17Eine Blume für Dénes Zsigmondy - in memoriam Anneliese Nissen-Zsigmondy
03:06 - 18In memoriam Tamás Blum
02:13 - 19Perpetuum mobile A - Vadas Ágnesnek
00:50 - 20Perpetuum mobile B
01:22 - 21Hommage à John Cage
01:52 - 22Schatten - Perényi Miklósnak
00:45 - 23Jelek (Signs) I - Perènyi Miklósnak
00:59 - 24János Pilinszky: Gérard de Nerval - Kocsis Zoltának
01:28 - 25Virág az ember, Mijakónak
01:30 - ...pas à pas - nulle part... op. 36
- 26Introduzione
01:24 - 27...pas à pas - nulle part...
00:56 - 28le nain - hommage à Roland Moser
01:07 - 29octave - message à Pierre Boulez
00:34 - 30...le tout petit macabre-Ligetinek ...imagine...
01:03 - 31octave (double) - à Isabelle Kurtág
00:44 - 32écoute-les
00:40 - 33berceuse - hommage à Heinz Holliger
00:57 - 34Intermezzo I
00:38 - 35...d'où la voix...
00:34 - 36elles viennent... - hommage à Gösta Neuwirth
01:06 - 37rêve - hommage à Henri Pousseur
00:40 - 38apparition - à Jehuda Elkana
00:31 - 39fous... - à Annamarie Brunner
00:31 - 40fin fond de néant... - hommage à Eric Satie
01:21 - 41en face le pire...
00:17 - 42inventaire - hommage à Jan van Vlijmen
00:46 - 43Intermezzo II
01:02 - 44Dieppe - hommage à Francois Sulyok
01:35 - 45La calma
00:29 - 46Intermezzo III
00:33 - 47mouvement
00:40 - 48de pied ferme
01:05 - 49...levons l'ancre...
00:41 - 50du coeur de l'homme.../how hollow heart
00:36 - 51sleep...
00:51 - 52oblivion, sweet oblivion - hommage à Christian Wolff
00:56 - 53"Lasciate ogni speranza"
00:58 - 54a shocking case - ...a little song for Liz Baker
00:53 - 55Valse - hommage à Helmut Lachenmann
00:31 - 56Intermezzo IV - Pizzicato keringö - hommage à Ránki György
01:43 - 57Méditation
00:40 - 58...une découverte bouleversante
00:38 - 59asking for salve and solace - hommage à Merran Joy Poplar
02:09
Years have passed since György Kurtág’s last ECM recording, which incorporated his “Jatékok (Games)” and “Bach Transcriptions”, made with Kurtág and wife Márta playing piano together.
The birth of this newest album has been an arduous one, with the composer intensely and meticulously involved at every step of the way. And if “Games” are at the centre of this recording, too, they are often life-and-death games – echoing the endgame humours of Samuel Beckett’s universe and the anguish of Hölderlin – in a programme in which two song cycles are bridged by the “Signs, Games and Messages” for strings. (As England’s The Independent has observed, “György Kurtág never writes a note lacking musical intent, and never writes a note with which he has not lived and suffered.”) “Kurtág’s described all three cycles as “Works In Progress” and their formal boundaries are particularly fluid, even within the context of an oeuvre in which labyrinths of connecting threads (musical, literary, philosophical, epistolary) have become the norm.
Kurtág has consistently revised these works, reordered the movements, added new movements, set others aside, both for concert performances and in the realization of this album. Although “Signs, Games and Messages” includes among its numerous dedicatees an “Hommage à John Cage”, the tight control that Kurtág exerts over every grain of sound, every gesture, sigh and silence, makes his work the converse of “indeterminate”. And yet the way the pieces move, as chains of interlinked miniatures (only one of the 59 tracks here has a duration of more than three minutes), conveys a sense of living tissue as well as an “improvisational” freshness. “A whole world of expression and suggestion” is indeed “packed into these exquisite, crystalline forms” (The Guardian).
The album begins with six sections from the “Hölderlin-Gesänge” primarily for solo baritone, whose solitude is broken in one section (“Gestalt und Geist”) by the arrival – in this version – of trombone and tuba. As Thomas Bösche notes in the CD booklet: “Various attempts have been made to describe Kurtág’s handling of literary texts, for there is a secret here that is difficult to decode. In his settings, Kurtág penetrates deep into the often hermetic texts and arrives at a clarity and simplicity born of that depth. Kurtág’s world – as Walter Benjamin said of Franz Kafka – is the theatre of life. The poetic utterance is transformed into musical gestures and positioned on an imaginary stage. With hubris – ruinous human arrogance – as a central motif in Hölderlin’s late work, and equally in Kurtág’s settings, the fortissimo outburst of “Verwegner! möchtest von Angesicht zu Angesicht/ Die Seele sehn” [“Reckless! wanting to see the soul/ Face to face”] in “Gestalt und Geist” becomes the cycle’s centre of gravity.” Concluding the “Hölderlin-Gesänge” is a setting of Paul Celan’s famous “Tübingen, Janner” which the poet wrote after visiting the town where Hölderlin spent the final years of his life.
“…pas à pas – nulle part” is a set of 22 Samuel Beckett poems plus Beckett translations of the maxims of Sebastien Chamfort (1712-1794), a pioneering misanthropic aphorist whose caustic wit was predestined to strike a chord with the expatriate Irishman. As for Beckett and Kurtág, the Hungarian composer fell under the dramatist’s spell in 1957 when a performance of “Endgame” in Paris seemed to address his own existential despair. Of course these artists share both bleakness and humanity as well an acute sense of the futility and the necessity of artistic utterance in troubled times. The Kurtág settings are of poems Beckett wrote in French and published in 1978 under the title "Mirlintonnades". Jotted down originally on scraps of paper, backs of envelopes, beer mats and whiskey bottle labels, the function of this “French doggerel” – to quote Beckett – was to keep despondency at bay in everyday life.
Thomas Bösche: “On the occasion of György Kurtág’s seventieth birthday, Hungarian author György Dalos was more than justified in asking: how can a composer who has concentrated exclusively on the essentials throughout his career possibly arrive at a late style marked by greater concentration and attention to the essentials. That even more intense concentration and radicalisation of what has always been inherent to Kurtág’s work is possible becomes eminently clear in the composer’s Hölderlin and Beckett settings. If ever justice has been done to Arnold Schoenberg’s dictum that music should not be decorative, but truthful, then it is here, where differentiation and intimacy are coupled with outward austerity.”
Of “Signs, Games and Messages” itself, music historian and former Kurtág pupil Rachel Beckles Willson has written: “One can hardly call this work a ‘string trio’: it is more like a conversation between three players, a conversation which sometimes attains synthesis and is sometimes dysfunctional or abstruse. The movements are short. They were often composed in one sweep on a single afternoon, in response to news, a mood or a thought. In their resultant abundance they can have been compared to diary entries.”