Hommage à Kurtág

To mark the 100th birthday of György Kurtág, the Klavier Festival Ruhr celebrated the greatest living composer with a two-day series of extraordinary concerts. The star at the piano was undoubtedly the most accomplished Kurtág specialist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who has enjoyed a decades-long collaboration and friendship with the composer.

Also present at this very special birthday celebration was the “Op. 353018”, which is itself celebrating a milestone birthday this year and, at 70 years old, is just 30 years younger than György Kurtág. Kurtág described ‘Op. 353018’ as ‘a miracle’ when he met our piano duo grand piano in person a few years ago in Budapest during the recording of ‘Játékok’.

The first concert of this “extraordinary mini-festival”, as the Klavier Festival Ruhr described it, was given by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who performed a version of his concert programme “LES MAÎTRES DE L’INTIME” adapted to suit the occasion:

This time, miniatures by Kurtág, Schubert and Mozart provided the musical framework for this extraordinary concert format, which emerged during the pandemic:

Pierre-Laurent Aimard deliberately breaks with the often outdated structures of the commercialised concert industry. The artist deliberately eschews large concert halls, highly virtuosic music played at high volume and glaring spotlights for his programme. There are no conventionally arranged rows of seats, nor is there a frontal stage position.

Instead, the five instruments (two upright pianos, a concert grand, a celesta and a Yamaha Disklavier) are scattered throughout the room (one of the Yamaha upright pianos sounds as if it were distant music coming from the far-off foyer of an adjacent church) and are only then bathed in a subtle, warm light when the pianist takes his seat at one of them and waits for his cue.

As part of his preparation, Pierre-Laurent Aimard records selected pieces on the Disklavier hours before the concert begins and checks the acoustic and musical result in the hall several times from different seats.

Later, during the concert, Pierre-Laurent Aimard will then play each of the five instruments, sometimes several times, and his previously recorded pieces will be played back – as if by magic – by the Disklavier, whilst the pianist wanders from instrument to instrument in the darkened hall, pausing amongst the audience on his way and waiting for the final notes of the Disklavier to fade away before beginning his next playing.

The uniqueness of this overall concept makes this concert a truly special experience: an experience of intensity, of silence, of time, of wonder, and of hearing every single note, every single, infinitely delicate sound as it shifts between emerging and fading away, between space and time. The audience was visibly moved by the magic of their own intense experience.

Magnificent!

The very next day saw another wonderful new encounter between our “Op. 353018” and Lorenzo Soulès, the internationally acclaimed former master student of Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Lorenzo Soulès performed, together with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, an arrangement of Bach’s chorale cantatas “Ach wie nichtig, ach wie flüchtig” and “Alle Menschen müssen sterben”, as well as Kurtág’s “Eight Piano Pieces, Op. 3” as a soloist on the “Op. 353018”. The Lyon-born pianist rendered the “Piano Pieces” with such tonal subtlety and technical finesse that it would surely have brought a benevolent smile to the face of György Kurtág – known and feared for his uncompromising nature – with his indescribably keen intuition and unerring ears.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard then performed Játékok X and XI in his usual masterful and outstanding manner, and accompanied the Dutch mezzo-soprano Gerrie de Vries in “Samuel Beckett: What is the Word”, Op. 30b.