Recollections of the teaching of György Kurtág
How did you come into contact with György Kurtág? When did you work together, when did he teach you?
In the first days of August 2024 I was teaching at a summer music course in the Slovakian town of Pöstyén, when my phone rang, displaying a Budapest landline on the screen. These days such numbers tend to belong to authorities’ offices, so I thought I’d better answer, as they can be rather difficult to call back. At the other end of the line Gyuri bácsi introduced himself in a faintly audible voice. He briefly told me that he wanted to surprise our mutual friend, László Gőz on the occasion of his 70th birthday with a big band piece that he was to compose for the instrumentation of Modern Art Orchestra. He was asking for my help in orchestration and getting acquainted with the instruments of the formation. Needless to say, I could hardly believe my ears, I was shocked. Collaboration started around early September. Right after finishing and performing the piece I immediately received my next assignment, which became another piece composed to a 70th birthday, this time for György Kurtág Junior.
What does György Kurtág’s art and teaching mean to you and how has it influenced your career and thinking?
I am only fractionally familiar with the whole of his oeuvre, I don’t think György Kurtág’s music is actually manifest in my own musical world, however, during the past year I have immersed myself ever deeper into his ways of construction and mentality. In this regard our cooperation is of invaluable significance to me. So much so that one of the most inspiring tasks I had in a long while was to formulate our joint 99th birthday greeting composition stemming from György Kurtág’ cantus firmus. In this created work both of our merged musicalities can be traced, both of our fingerprints can be heard.
If you can, please recall a memorable situation and how he taught certain musical works and what you learned from him during your collaboration!
My situation is rather special, ours is not a classic tutor-disciple relationship. Hence I can only recite our collaborations here. Hommage à Gőz László 70 was actually a version of an earlier piano piece renowned from Játékok (Games) rearranged for a big band formation. In this context, I found it very important to uncover the delicacy and flexibility of the solo piano performance. A soloist has limitless possibilities while performing a solo piece. The structure of the orchestra significantly reduces and limits this. This one was a hard problem to overcome for us, as Kurtág’s vision for composing originates in solo piano performances. The most informative cases were always the ones where I asked him to sing the actual phrase. I would record these when meeting him in person, and then by listening to him repeatedly, I tried to acquire the tempo, the agogic stresses he used when singing the given phrases.
I have received the work he composed for György Kurtág junior, MAO Gigue line by line, each composed separately, but formally not quite amounting to a whole piece, as it were. He was working on these short little phrases for weeks, but didn’t quite get to shape them up in a clear format. That’s where I stepped into the picture and tried to outline a larger arch from these lines made up of a few bars. And in this arch I already used improvisation as a tool, furthermore, knowing the soloists and their potential, I arranged the format of the piece so that each dynamic and emotional unit would fit the character of soloist. I composed a piece for György Kurtág’s 99th birthday, entitled Hommage à hommageur, for which I had only asked him for a starter melody, of course he knew nothing about what I was going to use it for. This work – as I have previously mentioned – bears both our emblematic characteristics, while still being coherent. I really love this composition, and it is my absolute pleasure to have been able to perform it so superbly together with the soloists and the orchestra. My gracious thanks for that!
