You could mark György Kurtág’s 100th birthday with one of the Hungarian composer’s large-scale works – the monumental 1994 elegy Stele, his Beckett-based debut opera Fin de partie (premiered in 2018 when the composer was 92), or the violent surrealism of 2003’s Concertante – but that would risk misunderstanding the genius of “the master of the miniature”, a musician at his truest in economy, brevity, provisionality. Luckily, pianist Tamara Stefanovich had something else in mind.
Titled Labyrinth, Stefanovich’s recital proposed an essay in sound in which Kurtág’s short piano works (many from ongoing series Játékok) were woven into and out of works by Debussy, Liszt and JS Bach. Performing this 90-minute cycle without pause, smudging the edges between pieces, Stefanovich paid homage to a composer whose sound world is alive with musical ghosts, drawing out its echoes and exposing its palimpsests.
Bach’s early Capriccio for the departure of a beloved brother – an unusual, programmatic sequence of musical tableaux – stared into the mirror of Kurtág’s mercurial Eight Piano Pieces, No 3’s slippery interplay of voices glancing back to Bach’s counterpoint (now receding in the fog), but also reaching out towards the chalky impressionism of Debussy. Apple Blossom (one of Játékok’s many musical games) was a Schumann or Mendelssohn folk song that had strayed from the homeward path, wandering directly into Liszt’s late Nuages gris in a sleight of hand that left you questioning your own ears. Surely these persistent, unresolved storm clouds belonged to another century?
Not content with blurring repertoire, Stefanovich also smeared styles. Kurtág was theatrical, almost Romantic in the scope of its gestures, Debussy all negative space and modernity. Heavily pedalled, often strident, her Bach won’t have been for everyone, but with so much musical aphorism and impermanence you can understand Stefanovich casting him as earth wire, or thread through the maze.
Her decision to close with the final Contrapunctus from The Art of Fugue – suddenly broken off at the place Bach left it unfinished – was inspired: a jagged fragment ripped from the book in real time. Kurtág’s Pantomime saw Stefanovich’s hands approach the keyboard by way of coda, before coyly darting away without a sound struck. Wit and silence; the only possible birthday tribute to a singular musical voice.
