György Kurtág, widely regarded as Hungary’s greatest living composer, once described the art of composition as a process of “continual research” aimed at achieving “a sort of unity with as little material as possible.” Like Anton Webern, whose music he came to love long before it was widely known behind the Iron Curtain, the 98-year-old Kurtág is at heart a miniaturist. Both his aphoristic musical language and the performing forces he uses to express it are radically compressed. Yet despite the abundance of “white space” in a typical Kurtág score, his music is densely packed, eventful, and richly allusive. Economical though he may be with notes, Kurtág has little in common with such minimalist composers as Philip Glass, John Adams, and Arvo Pärt.
For Kurtág, writing music can be quite literally child’s play. Játékok, or “Games,” is the collective title of an open-ended series of pieces for one and two pianos that he began more than 50 years ago, when he was suffering from a kind of writer’s block. (The series now runs to 10 volumes comprising hundreds of pieces.) Játékok evinces the playful, childlike spirit that infuses much of the composer’s music. Children, Kurtág wrote in the preface to Book I, instinctively approach the piano as if it were a toy: “They experiment with it, caress it, attack it, and run their fingers over it. They pile up seemingly disconnected sounds, and if this happens to arouse their musical instinct, they look consciously for some of the harmonies found by chance and keep repeating them.”
In outline, “Play with Infinity” is simplicity itself: an extended chromatic “glissando” that descends lazily over a span of more than six octaves—almost the entire keyboard—punctuated by isolated notes and dissonant clusters marked “quasi flageolet” (“like harmonics”). Kurtág disembodies the player as well as the instrument, instructing the pianist to “hardly touch the keys.” The very short piece traces a dynamic arc from quadruple piano to forte and back again, finally dying away “al niente” (“to nothing”), an aural emblem of infinity.
“Strange forms begin a joyous dance, as they gently fade toward a luminous point, then separate from each other flashing and sparkling, and hunt and pursue each other in myriad groupings. In the midst of the spirit kingdom thus revealed, the enraptured soul listens to the unknown language, and understands all the most secret allusions by which it has been aroused.” Thus did early–19th-century critic and novelist E. T. A. Hoffmann describe Beethoven’s chamber music in general, and the two Op. 70 piano trios in particular. To listeners steeped in the genial classicism of Mozart and Haydn, the muscular romanticism of Beethoven’s middle period seemed a strange and wondrously allusive language—almost, indeed, the “air of another plant” that bewildered audiences would encounter a century later in the work of another musical revolutionary, Arnold Schoenberg. Beethoven’s early piano trios, charming and inventive as they are, barely hint at the energy and audacity that burst forth in the Trio in E-flat Major and its companion in D major, the so-called “Ghost” Trio.
The E-flat–Major Trio abounds in ingenious and often idiosyncratic delights. For instance, the slow, quietly introspective introduction returns near the end of the opening Allegro ma non troppo, paving the way for a breezy coda that features the recurring trill motif that generates so much of the first movement’s dynamic energy. Beethoven displays his formidable variation technique in the second-movement Allegretto (in place of the conventional slow movement): It features not one but two themes (in sunny C major and sultry C minor) that serve as the basis for a series of interlocking double-variations. The first movement’s brisk, free-flowing 6/8 meter is echoed in the waltz-like lilt of the third movement, whose warm A-flat–major tonality—the third key the listener has encountered in as many movements—marks a further departure from the sound world of Haydn and Mozart. Here again, Beethoven plots his transitions cunningly: The center section of the A-B-A–form structure circles back by way of a hauntingly ethereal and harmonically searching bridge passage. The home key is resoundingly reestablished in the swashbuckling Finale, with its propulsive rhythms and vigorously striding themes in Beethoven’s best “heroic” manner.
Alongside a sense of childlike play and open-minded exploration, another thread that runs throughout Kurtág’s work is a dialogue with friends and fellow composers, of the past as well as the present. Both threads are present in Signs, Games and Messages (in Hungarian, Jelek, játékok és üzenetek), another open-ended series of short pieces that Kurtág initiated in the late 1980s. Books I and II of the collection are for solo violin and viola, respectively, while Book III—from which the four pieces we’ll hear tonight are taken—is scored for string trio.
In “You are a flower, to Miyako”—a nod to the Japanese pianist and conductor Furiya Miyako, one of Kurtág’s pupils—shimmering halos of sound radiate outward, like petals of a flower. “Hommage à J. S. B. (Dem Trio Orlando)” pays tribute to Bach in a chain of two- and three-note figures that swirl around each other in a kind of gestural counterpoint. The slashing dissonances of “Signs VI” derive from Kurtág’s Jelek, Op. 5, a six-movement work for solo viola dating from 1961. “Ligatura Y” is among a series of brief tonal essays in which Kurtág explores the concept of ligatures, or tied notes. In this case, the linkage takes the form of a sequence of slow-moving, densely chromaticized chords, with violin and viola alternately standing out “in rilievo” (“in relief”).
“I am at the height of my powers and must make use of my youth while it lasts,” Schumann confided to his diary in September 1842. Despite its ups and downs—the composer had begun to complain of worrisome bouts of despondency and depression—his 32nd year had truly been an annus mirabilis in terms of chamber music. A surge of creativity had already produced, in quick succession, the three string quartets of Op. 41. Schumann was deeply immersed in his Op. 44 Piano Quintet, and before the year was out, he would finish both the Piano Quartet, Op. 47, and the Op. 88 Phantasiestücke for piano trio.
In preparation for resuming the chamber music project he had set aside several years earlier, Schumann had steeped himself in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Like them, he found the discipline of writing chamber music for strings, with and without piano, both challenging and liberating. Deliberately distancing himself from the literary models that had inspired much of his earlier programmatic music, he concentrated instead on structural clarity and the craft of composition. It’s no coincidence that both the Piano Quartet and its cousin, the Piano Quintet (also in E-flat major), feature elaborate fugal finales that recall material presented earlier.
Schumann’s command of thematic transformation is evident in his handling of the gently sighing four-note figure that the strings play at the outset of the Op. 47 Quartet. It generates much of the thematic material for the first movement and resurfaces throughout the quartet in various guises. (Keeping track of the family resemblance among themes is one of the pleasures of listening to Schumann’s music.) The Mendelssohnian Scherzo, in G minor, contrasts a torrent of driving eighth notes with two trio interludes of a sweeter, more relaxed disposition. The tenderly yearning theme of the Andante cantabile—again derived from the embryonic four-note figure—is one of Schumann’s most inspired melodies. The slow movement ends with a rumination on a group of three notes, which Schumann deftly transforms into the three staccato chords that set the fugal machine in motion in the athletic Finale.
—Harry Haskell