On Játékok György Kurtág and his wife Márta Kurtág play a selection from his ongoing series of piano miniatures, interleaved with four of his transcriptions of Johann Sebastian Bach. The thirty-four tracks, alone or four hands at one keyboard, are sequenced as a single composed programme. Their duo recitals had been hailed as a highlight of the concerts for Kurtág's seventieth birthday in 1996, and the ECM album followed a year later.
Kurtág began Játékok (Games) in the early 1970s, after more than three years of creative silence following The Sayings of Peter Bornemisza. His starting point was the child at the piano for whom the instrument is still a toy. He insisted, though, that the collection "is absolutely not a piano method". The score appeared from Editio Musica Budapest in 1979 with a playful preface, and further volumes kept growing the series. The couple recorded this selection in July 1996 in the Mozart-Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus, with Stephan Schellmann as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. The booklet includes a text by Peter Eötvös.
Many pieces last less than a minute. The opening Flowers We Are, Mere Flowers intones seven notes, Knots takes eighteen seconds and Beating, Quarrelling worries at three. There are tributes to Domenico Scarlatti, to Igor Stravinsky in a peal of bells, and to Christian Wolff. Others honour Kurtág's teacher Ferenc Farkas, Márta herself and the mother of György Ligeti. In the Hommage à Halmágyi Mihály the piano imitates a cimbalom, recalling the Transylvanian folk violinist Mihály Halmágyi. Between them sit the Bach chorale preludes Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir and O Lamm Gottes unschuldig, the Sonatina from the Actus tragicus and a trio sonata movement.
The British press was enthusiastic. In Gramophone Arnold Whittall called the sequence "as memorable and as profound as any to be had from new music today". In The Sunday Times Paul Driver wrote that the last Bach arrangement "so uncannily evokes organ timbre that you suspect electronic interference". Geoffrey Norris in The Daily Telegraph heard the transcriptions as points of repose that sharpen the impact of Kurtág's epigrams.
This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1619, first released on 1 September 1997.
