The piano duo of Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams recently recorded all of the works composed for piano four hands or two pianos from György Kurtág’s monumental series Games (Játékok), and a rich selection of his Transcriptions (Átiratok) for piano duo of works by early masters. The new album has been released on the Wergo label, a record company specializing in contemporary music.

More than half of Kurtág’s short pieces for piano duo were published in 1979 in Volumes I, III and IV of Games; several other such works make up Volume VIII of the same series, published in 2010. Their composition, unlike their publishing, was a continuous, albeit uneven, process so there is no obvious “evolution” or “break” in the style of the series. Later pieces are often variants or new realizations of former ones.

Kurtág’s compositions, as always, are remarkable for their intensity of emotion and for the composer’s sense of musical fantasy. This recording, however, is notable for Bugallo’s and Williams’s precision, their sensitive attention paid to the minute details, and, above all, their intimate familiarity with Kurtág’s personal musical language and syntax. In their performance, we hear his whole complex sound world built up as adense tissue of musical reminiscences of people as well as literary and artistic experiences. Even in a piece dedicated to the renowned Transylvanian folk fiddler, Mihály Halmágyi, we have the impression that the performers innately have the “mother tongue” which is needed for conjuring up this remote musical world.

As to the transcriptions following the pieces from Games, the author of the sleeve notes aptly states that they “bear no less weight than Kurtág’s original compositions; they dialogue with each other.” Transcriptions of works and movements by Machaut, Lassus, Frescobaldi, Schütz, Purcell, and Bach are shown in their full transparency, in a special, glorifying lighting, still preserving the sheer beauty, the taste and fragrance of the original composition.

As a kind of appendix, the recording concludes with Kurtág’s miniature four-movement Suite for four hands, published in 1956.

Argentinian-born pianist and musicologist Helena Bugallo and American pianist and composer Amy Williams formed the Bugallo–Williams piano duo in 1995, when they were both graduate students at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Since then, they have become avid proponents of contemporary music, having played many new works and masterpieces of the twentieth century, including works by Cage, Debussy, Feldman, Kagel, Ligeti, Nancarrow, Sciarrino, Stravinsky, and Wolpe. They are frequent guests of renowned music festivals around the world, and have a remarkably large discography.
(János Malina)