Yegods, this was tough. I had to write program notes for a kind of music I really, really, really do not like. Here is a weird and difficult (although brief) quartet by a Jewish Hungarian composer named Gyorgy Kurtag, who was born in Lugos, a town that was once Hungarian (birthplace of Bela Lugosi!) but then became part of Romania. Anyway, here are my notes: String Quartet, Op 28 “Officium breve in memoriam Adreae Szervánsky” Hungarian composers and musicians seem to excel at eccentricity, and perhaps being both Jewish and Hungarian entitles György Kurtág to an even more heightened sense of outsiderness. Seen in European music circles as a musical heir of both Webern and Bartók, Kurtág, now 88, has mastered compression, distillation and the ecstatic appreciation of the moment. Many of his works are laconically brief, with titles like “messages,” “splinters,” “fragments,” and “microludes. As a survivor of the wars and political upheavals and Cold War and post-Cold War turmoil of his homeland, he is perhaps compelled to be brief, his works like telegrams or missives smuggled past borders and under the noses of frowning censors. In tonight’s quartet, titled Officium Breve, in Memoriam Andreae Szervánsky¸ we have a tribute from one composer to a predecessor and mentor, Endre Szervánsky (1911-1977). The dedicatee worked in the vein of Bartók and then moved into 12-tone methods in his later work. His 1953 Requiem is based on a text about the Auschwitz concentration camp. Sveránsky was given the Righteousness Among Nations award by the state of Israel, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Composed in 1989 more than ten years after his first quartet, the work is not spontaneous, but in fact took a decade of work to assemble. Moments that would have been the climax points or resolutions of some harmonic crisis in a traditional quartet are presented alone, succeeding one another, challenging the listener to experience, relate, remember. This tightly-clenched music , although not overtly “about” anything, is unavoidably heard as a central European cry of the heart. If you had lived through Nazis and watched Russian tanks overrun your homeland, your music too, might shake a fist and hold its secrets close. The tribute to Szervansky also unavoidably colors this work with the heroism of its dedicatee. In a mere sixteen minutes or so, Kurtág unveils fifteen brief movements (some as short as 20 seconds), a kind of high-speed Pictures at an Exhibition. Instead of the depictions of folk life and architecture depicted by Mussorgsky, however, this music is more like an aural exhibit of Paul Klee paintings, whirling by almost as fast as one can focus on them. There are no primary and secondary themes to follow in this music, no sonata form, no repetition of motives. It is a work to be experienced instant by instant, the mind attentive and alert. The four players are asked to play every note as if life depended upon it, and every effect and timbre of the strings is employed. It is a distillation of color and atmosphere without any of the traditional building blocks of music. This is not easy music, but neither was the 20th century a succession of waltzes. youtube/watch?v=vyEWGmzh9_I
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 03:53:38 +0000
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