I never heard the music of Hungarian modernist György Kurtág before, but that’s my loss…the CD Hommage A Kurtág (NEW FOCUS RECORDINGS FCR347B) includes the entirety of “Signs, Games and Messages” for solo violin and it’s played here by Movses Pogossian, a fellow doing much good work for the Armenian Music Program at UCLA in the US.
One takeaway from hearing these 15 discrete parts of “Signs” is the remarkable concision and brevity of the composer – most sections are about one minute or less in length. I admire the ability to compress information into a short space, and this may indeed be a “post-Webern” thing as the press notes point out. The concision of Anton Webern’s is such that it was regarded as pretty radical in the early 20th century, and the intensity of the music was peerless. One benchmark is that you can fit his entire output on just six CDs. Kurtág was also a contemporary of my beloved Ligeti, the “other” notable Hungarian modernist (unless you include Kodály) who also suffered from political oppression, but Ligeti seems to have more luck rehabilitating himself. Kurtág wound up in Paris in the 1950s, and despite studying with Messiaen and Milhaud (circumstances which would make anyone happy, you’d think), was locked in a crippling depression so bad that he needed therapy to escape it.
Perhaps some of his mental anguish has ended up in the bars of the music here, where the 15 subtitles sometimes refer to the mood (Doloroso), the method (Calmo, Sognando) or are intended as explicit references to other composers (Bach and Cage). In fact now I read them these 15 chapters are as elaborate as a verbal maze, with taut and complex music to match. Movses Pogossian is, to my ears, layering in a certain measure of compassion and humanity in his expressive tone to help us through these layers of severity, these intellectual conundrums. He also pursues the Hungarian theme by including a Bartok piece in the set, and there are commissions from four recent composers – Shirazi, Rhie, Wie, and Lena Frank – which are intended as “response works” to the original “Signs, Games and Messages” and expressly meant to be played by Pogossian. All four of them certainly manage to conform to the “brevity” thing, with pieces coming it at the expected 1-2 minute mark, but somewhere I feel these latecomers lack the density and content-rich approach of Kurtág – they’re copying the moves but have nothing much to say. Well, now I just want to hear some of the composer’s 1970s albums on the Hungaroton label. This, from 21st October 2022.