Celebrations are underway for the 90th birthday of the great Hungarian composer György Kurtág, as a week-long Kurtág festival opens in Budapest. The Liszt Academy hosts a special concert on February 19 featuring András Keller conducting the Concerto Budapest, the Saint Ephraim Male Choir, pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich, cellist Louise Hopkins and György Kurtág Jr on electronics and keyboards. The programme will include the Hungarian premiere of a Kurtág composition dedicated to Pierre Boulez and a joint composition by Kurtág, his son and Olivier Cuendet. The festival programme also includes a piano concert by Zoltán Kocsis playing works from a manuscript that Kurtág prepared for him over a period of more than thirty years and the screening of a documentary entitled Kurtág Home Video by filmmaker Judit Kurtág.

ECM New Series has been a primary source for György Kurtág recordings since the mid-90s, when the label released Hommage à R. Sch, including Kurtág’s tribute to Robert Schumann, with Kim Kashkashian, Robert Levin and Eduard Brunner. Kashkashian went on to record Kurtág’s early Movement for Viola and Orchestra with the Netherland’s Radio Chamber Orchestra under Peter Eötvös, as well as solo viola music on the Grammy-winning album Kurtág/Ligeti. 

Other major recordings include the Kafka-Fragmente, with András Keller and Julianne Banse, Signs, Games and Messages with Kurtág’s settings of Hölderlin and Beckett, as well as the very special recordings of Márta and György Kurtág playing György’s Játékok miniatures and Bach transcriptions. These can be heard both on the CD Játékok and, in a later rendition live from Paris’s Cité de la Musique,  on the DVD/Blu-ray release Hommage à Haydée. Later this year ECM will release Kurtág’s Collected Works for Ensemble and Choir conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw.

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