Kurtág: Aimard: Játékok

Years ago, Pierre-Laurent Aimard set himself the goal of recording a selection of György Kurtág's "Játékok" ("Games") in the presence and with the approval of the composer.

Gyorgy Kurtág, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and our 353018 met in Budapest in 2022 to record the first, relatively new Játékok at the BMC (Budapest Music Centre). Inspired and motivated by the quality of this very intensive collaboration, the two exceptional artists decided to follow up the first recording with further „Játékok" and to go back further in time.

"Játékok" are short pieces, sometimes consisting of just a few notes and seemingly playable by any layman. Over the course of time, many artists have tried their hand at them - but only very rarely have the recordings earned the composer's acceptance.

"Játékok" is not a banal sequence of notes, tones and sounds in a specific time sequence and often at a very low volume. Each of these "games" tells its own real story:

The notes, their sounds and the time surrounding them are like words and sketches in a diary: they describe the protagonists, i.e. real people in a mostly real situation, and meticulously reproduce their actions, their words and the prevailing mood at that moment.

Each piece is like one of these razor-sharp black and white photos from a bygone era. And only the photographer himself knows the men and women, the houses and the streets from his own memory and personal experience.

But unlike in these old photos, the characters in György Kurtág's "Játékok" are still alive: they love and suffer - and they talk to each other. And for the composer, every even slightly different articulation of a note, a different breathing of its sound, or a timing that differs by a thousandth of a second changes the stories, some of which date back many decades, to the point of unrecognisability.

The challenge for the pianist was therefore not to play the right notes, but to play the notes correctly and thus reproduce the stories in detail and truthfully.

One now understands why it was so important for Pierre-Laurent Aimard to present the truly authentic testimony of the "Játékok" and its stories in the presence of its creator and probably its only surviving contemporary witness.