Kurtág / Ligeti: Music for Viola

Kim Kashkashian

EN / DE

Kim Kashkashian has long been one of the most outstanding protagonists of modern composition and this bold and subtle account of solo music by the great Hungarian composers Kurtág and Ligeti is a landmark recording. Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages (1989 – in progress) in its nineteen aphoristic sections is as demanding as Ligeti’s Sonata for viola (1991-94), but Kashkashian surmounts the very different challenges of the works, and points towards the qualities that unite these composers. As ever, she gets to the heart of the music, and unravels its secrets.

Kim Kashkashian gilt seit langem als eine der herausragenden Interpretinnen zeitgenössischer Musik, und die vorliegende, gleichermaßen kühne wie subtile Einspielung von Solostücken der großen ungarischen Komponisten Kurtág und Ligeti ist ein Meilenstein. Kurtágs “Signs, Games and Messages (1989 – in progress)” mit seinen neunzehn aphoristisch knappen Abschnitten ist so herausfordernd wie Ligetis “Sonata for viola (1991-94)“, doch Kashkashian meistert die unterschiedlichen Schwierigkeiten der Werke nicht nur, sie arbeitet auch die Qualitäten, die diese beiden Komponisten verbinden, heraus. Wie stets dringt sie ins Innerste der Musik vor und enthüllt deren Geheimnisse.
Featured Artists Recorded

May 2011, Propstei St. Gerold

Original Release Date

24.08.2012

  • Jelek, játékok és üzenetek / Signs, Games and Messages
    (György Kurtág)
  • 1In Nomine - all'ongherese (Damjanich emlékko)04:39
  • 2Csendes sorok Dobszay Lászlónak / Silent Lines to László Dobszay01:38
  • 3Levél Ligeti Verának / Letter to Vera Ligeti02:01
  • 4Zöld erdobol magyar nóta - A 60 éves Földes Imrének / For Imre Földes at 6001:30
  • 5Kromatikus feleselos / Chromatically saucy01:20
  • 6Virág Zsigmondy Dénesnek / A Flower for Dénes Zsigmondy02:30
  • 7In memoriam Blum Tamás02:10
  • 8In memoriam Aczél György00:58
  • 9H.J.-nóta / J.H.-Song01:04
  • 10Vagdalkozós / Beating00:28
  • 11The Carenza Jig00:51
  • 12Kroó György in memoriam03:42
  • 13Hommage à John Cage (Elakadó Szavak / Faltering Words)01:21
  • 14Doloroso "Garzulyéknak" / "For the Garzulys"01:37
  • 15Perpetuum mobile01:08
  • 16Jelek I / Signs I00:55
  • 17Jelek II / Signs II00:42
  • 18Четыре сплетённых тела... / Négy összefonódó test - Gerlóczy Sári kiállítására / Four Entwined Bodies - to the Exhibition by Sári Gerlóczy00:32
  • 19Panaszos nóta02:03
  • Sonata for Viola Solo
    (György Ligeti)
  • 201. Hora lunga05:23
  • 212. Loop02:36
  • 223. Facsar06:17
  • 234. Prestissimo con sordino01:46
  • 245. Lamento03:46
  • 256. Chaconne chromatique04:03
György Kurtág (b. 1926) and György Ligeti (1923-2006) were friends, for more than sixty years. “For a long time, a lifetime, Ligeti led me onward,” said Kurtág. “I followed him – sometimes right behind him and other times years or even decades later. I call it my ‘Imitatio Christi’ syndrome. The first years of our friendship were marked not only by his intellectual leadership. I oriented my taste according to his example.”

Yet how different are their respective oeuvres: Ligeti vastly prolific, Kurtág parsimonious in his productions, strongly self-critical, determined to justify every note (“Every tone has to be deserved”). For parallel artistic allies one might have to look beyond music: to literature perhaps, to Joyce’s cascading river run of language and Beckett grimly squeezing drops of inspiration from a dry sponge. Kurtág and Ligeti had a similar aesthetic relationship: sharing a nationality – and a “mother tongue” in Bartók – their contrasting temperaments took them to different places. Ligeti’s frame of reference can be encyclopaedic, in the space of a single composition alluding to higher mathematics and folk dance and welcoming any resultant “strangeness”, Kurtág always more aphoristic, cryptic, terse, has built a halting language out of miniatures, works which seem to take on a new intensity when sequenced. His works can be quietly eruptive: Peter Eötvös once referred to Kurtág as “a very shy volcano”, a characterization that catches both the charm and force of his work.

Kim Kashkashian, one of the preeminent artists of ECM New series, has devoted herself to Kurtág’s oeuvre for viola for more than 20 years and, as Wolfgang Sandner notes in the booklet to this disc has developed a remarkable rapport for the relation between compositional fabric and sonic nuance when performing it. Already in the early 1990s Kashkashian was recording Kurtág’s works for ECM, including the solo cycle “Jelek” which the composer revised with and for her, and “Neun Stücke for Viola solo”, pieces subsequently integrated into the ongoing “Signs, Games and Messages”. She has also recorded Kurtág’s early Movement for Viola and Orchestra on a disc addressing modern Hungarian composition (Eötvös/Bartók/Kurtág) with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra.

The present album, recorded at the Propstei St Gerold in May 2011, finds Kashkashian exploring and contrasting the solo viola works of Kurtág and Ligeti. Kashkashian and producer Manfred Eicher determined the dramaturgical sequence of the present version of “Signs, Games and Messages” which leads naturally toward the Ligeti Sonata. Sandner: “In Kashkashian’s scrupulous reading, the Kurtág pieces and the movements of Ligeti’s Viola Sonata seem like the work of a single visionary artist”.

György Ligeti appreciated the dark sounds of the viola, in his introduction to the Sonata he wrote, “The viola is seemingly just a big violin but tuned a fifth lower. In reality the two instruments are worlds apart. They both have three strings in common, the A, D and G string. The high E-string lends the violin a powerful luminosity and metallic penetrating tone which is missing in the viola. The violin leads, the viola remains in the shadow. In return the low C-string gives the viola a unique acerbity, compact, somewhat hoarse, with an aftertaste of wood, earth and tannic acid.”