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Pentatone5
It may be a bit early in springtime to be nominating an Album of the Year, but I’ll be very surprised if any release in the next eight months makes me sit up and take note with such awe and excitement as this absolute cracker from the Dutch label Pentatone.
The composer turned 99 two months ago. He has been writing this piano series – the Hungarian title means ‘Games – since 1973, adding fresh episodes every now and then. There are 75 complete movements to this suite and another ten in manuscript. Kurtág may yet have more up his sleeve so it would be wrong to regard this recording as definitive, but it’s certainly authoritative. The pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard first sat with the composer at the keyboard in the winter of 1978. Aimard has watched Játékok grown literally beneath his fingers.
What is Játékok? Kurtág has described it as a tribute to Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, a work designed to teach his infant son to play. But where Mikrokosmos smells of the schoolroom, Játékok speaks of the composer’s entire cosmos. In pieces never longer than three minutes he describes people he knows, flowers he sees, a bunny in the grass. He tells in-jokes that actually seem funny – ‘Birthday Elegy for Judit – for the second finger of her left hand’ – nd he involves us in an interior life that is never dull. You will want to enter his world, to be part of his contemplations. This is music that fascinates from start to finish and Aimard plays it like a master-storyteller, sometimes a sit-down comic. It is unlike any other music I know. What I am struggling to describe is pure pleasure and revelation.
You try.
(If you’re in London, there’s a performance next Thursday lunchtime at the Wigmore Hall).
This page is also available in / Cette page est également disponible en:
Francais (French)
