Marta & Gyorgy Kurtág: In Memoriam Haydée: Játékok (Games and Transcriptions for piano solo and four hands)

Here's 80 minutes of the gentlest and most refined music-making imaginable...There's no more moving experience in music than to hear the Sonatina from Bach's Actus Tragicus played by these two,... — BBC Music Magazine, June 2015, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 16th Feb 2015
Catalogue No: 0762896
Label: ECM
Series: New Series

BBC Music Magazine

June 2015

Chamber Choice

Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days

Adieu, Haydée I

J.S. Bach: Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland (BWV 599)

Flowers we are… (embracing sounds)

J.S.Bach: Aus tiefer Not schrei’ ich zu dir (BWV 687) In memoriam Joannis Pilinszky

Prelude and Chorale, I. Prelude II

Choral for Benjamin Rajeczky’s 80th Birthday

Knots

Antiphony in F sharp

Lamentation (1)

Hommage à Christian Wolff (Half-asleep)

Playing with overtones

Draft-sheet for Tünde Szitha

...and once more: Flowers we are...

Beating - Quarelling

Study to Pilinszky’s Hölderlin (position exercise)

J.S.Bach: Sonatina from Actus tragicus, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (BWV 106)

Hommage à Stravinsky - Bells

Furious Chorale

Hoquetus

Palm stroke

Campanule

Thistle

Stubbunny

Merran’s dream (Caliban detecting - rebuilding Mirranda’s dream)

Hommage à Domenico Scarlatti

Aus der ferne (for Alfred Schlee’s 80th Birthday)

J.S.Bach: Duo No.3 in G major (BWV 804)

J.S.Bach: Das alte Jahr vergangen ist (BWV 614)

J.S.Bach: Alle Menschen müssen sterben (BWV 643)

J.S.Bach: First movement from Trio Sonata in E flat major (BWV 525)

Lamentation

Lamentation (2) In memoriam Ligeti Ilona

Tumble-bunny

Hommage à Kurtág Márta

J.S.Bach: O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig (BWV 618)

Evocation of Petrushka: Hommage à Farkas Ferenc (3)

Adoration, adoration, accursed desolation... : Hommage à Farkas Ferenc (4)

Hommage à Soproni (in memoriam matris carissimae)

Hommage à Halmágyi Mihály

Scraps of a colinda melody - faintly recollected: Hommage à Farkas Ferenc (2)

Hommage à Stravinsky - Bells

J.S.Bach: Duo No.3 in G major (BWV 804)

J.S.Bach: Sonatina from Actus tragicus, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (BWV 106)

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Subtitled ‘Játékok - Games and Transcriptions for piano solo and four hands’, this is a film, directed by Isabelle Soulard, of a concert given in September 2012 at Paris’s Cité de la Musique by the composer György Kurtág and his wife.

The duo performances of Márta and György Kurtág have long been distinguished by flinty new music precision, matched by a quick-witted playfulness and underpinned by a quality of affection. “What playing!” raved the New Yorker’s Alex Ross of a ‘Játékok’ concert. “Notes were placed with surgical care; inner voices gleamed in crystalline patterns; elusive emotional states were painted with quick, light strokes.” From its origins in the early 1970s as a good-humoured unsystematic approach to teaching contemporary keyboard techniques to young players (early pieces in the series included use of clusters, glissandi, harmonics, playing with palms and forearms - a wide range of gestures), ‘Játékok’ (Games) has developed into a compendium of epigrammatic homages, jewelled miniatures dedicated to composers from Scarlatti to Stravinsky and Christian Wolff, and tributes to colleagues and influences. In this special case the whole programme - 40 pieces plus three encores - is dedicated to the memory of the Kurtágs’ good friend, musicologist Haydée Charbagi (1979-2008). Interspersed amongst György Kurtág’s pieces are his much-admired Bach transcriptions - ‘Játékok’ is a work that has gained strength through contrasting and cross-referencing with other music. The whole programme closes with a radiant version of Bach’s ‘Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit’.

Among ECM’s many widely-praised recordings of Kurtág’s music is a 1997 CD of ‘Játékok’ (4535112), likewise performed by the composer and his wife. “A very special experience - as memorable and as profound as any to be had from new music today,” said Gramophone.

DVD specification: Rating: E (exempt), Region Code: 0 (Worldwide)

Reviews

June 2015

Here's 80 minutes of the gentlest and most refined music-making imaginable...There's no more moving experience in music than to hear the Sonatina from Bach's Actus Tragicus played by these two, their grey heads inclined towards each other, their hands interwined.

May 2015

music poised between the discipline of an exercise and the spontaneity of a whim; 'games' as a dialogue of technique and inspiration…this is without doubt as fitting a way into this music, played by its most dedicated exponents, as one could wish.

22nd February 2015

This film of a 2012 Paris concert shows the Kurtágs’ complete interdependence, one standing and watching every moment as the other plays, gently touching a shoulder or smiling as they finish. At the end they seem quite surprised the audience is there.

Classical Music May 2015

An engrossing, ongoing series of miniatures, Játékok (‘games’) combines idiosyncratic, ear-catching slivers of sound with radiant Bach transcriptions…compelling viewing

Marta & Gyorgy Kurtág: In Memoriam Haydée

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