György Kurtág

This disc gathers all of György Kurtág's pieces for piano duet and two pianos from the eight published volumes of Játékok (Games), together with a selection of his transcriptions from Machaut to Bach. The performers are the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo, Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams.

Kurtág, born in 1926, is a Hungarian composer and pianist. He began Játékok in 1973 as a pedagogical series, at a time when his work was divided between composing and teaching piano and chamber music at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. The recording is a co-production with Bayerischer Rundfunk, edited by Helmut Rohm with Winfried Messmer as engineer. Federico Monjeau wrote the liner notes. The duo, formed in 1995, plays new works and twentieth-century music for piano four-hands and two pianos. Their debut, on Wergo in 2004, was devoted to their own piano-duet transcriptions of Nancarrow's player piano studies, followed by Stravinsky in Black and White in 2007.

Játékok can be seen as a continuation of Bartók's Mikrokosmos, in genre and in the influence Bartók exerted from a distance on that generation of Hungarian composers. Its aim is different, though. It is not a progressive course in piano technique; it teaches players to trust what Schoenberg called the infallibility of one's own fantasy. In the introduction Kurtág sets out rhythmic figures, note-heads, rests and different fermatas, whose actual proportions vary with context. Deciding how the music unfolds, the players must listen to every note, its dynamic, articulation, register and place on the page. Palms, fists and forearms are also used on the keyboard. Volume IV (17 minutes) and volume VIII, published in 2010 (22 minutes), take up most of the disc.

The transcriptions carry as much weight as the original pieces and are in dialogue with them. They pass through Machaut, Orlando di Lasso, Frescobaldi, Schütz, Purcell and Johann Sebastian Bach, and use the transparency of the piano, its monochrome sound, against the memory of orchestral colour. The early Suite for piano duo of 1956 closes the programme.

CD, Wergo WER 6766 2, released in 2015, with a 26-page booklet.