György Kurtág, Gyorgy Ligeti, Kim Kashkashian

Kim Kashkashian plays solo viola music by two Hungarian composers who were friends for more than sixty years. György Kurtág's Signs, Games and Messages, a collection begun in 1989 and still in progress, is heard in nineteen aphoristic pieces. György Ligeti's Sonata for viola solo (1991-94) answers it with six larger movements. The album won the Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo at the 55th Awards in 2013.

The recording was made in May 2011 at the Propstei St. Gerold in Austria, produced by Manfred Eicher with Peter Laenger as engineer, and the booklet essay is by Wolfgang Sandner. Kashkashian had by then played Kurtág's viola music for more than twenty years, and she had already recorded some of his earlier works for ECM in the 1990s. Ligeti's sonata grew out of his admiration for the viola playing of Tabea Zimmermann, who is the dedicatee of two of its movements. The Kurtág set covers pieces composed between 1961 and the early 2000s, several of them revised more than once.

Kurtág's pieces are mostly brief messages to friends, dedications and memorials, some lasting less than a minute. Among them are Letter to Vera Ligeti, A Flower for Dénes Zsigmondy, Kroó György in memoriam and a Hommage à John Cage subtitled Faltering Words. Others are games with a single idea, such as Perpetuum mobile or Chromatically saucy. The oldest, Signs I and II, go back to 1961. Ligeti's sonata opens with Hora lungă, a lament played on the C string alone. The composer noted that the viola "is seemingly just a big violin but tuned a fifth lower", with a darker, earthier sound. Facsar is written in memory of Sándor Veress, and the sonata ends with a Chaconne chromatique.

Michael Dervan gave the album five stars in The Irish Times in 2012, finding Kashkashian's playing "wonderfully concentrated" and noting that she "shines, too" in Ligeti's late sonata. Writing for I Care If You Listen in 2013, Caitlin Smith observed that her "sounds and silences are deliberate and careful, but not hesitant". Sandner's booklet note hears both sets as if they came from a single visionary artist.

CD edition of ECM New Series 2240, released on 24 August 2012.