The whole musical world celebrates Kurtág’s birthday on February 19. Our birthday present is two new publications. The first is a piano piece composed in 2013 entitled …couple egyptienne en route vers l’inconnu… (…an Egyptian couple on the way to the unknown…) which was inspired by a more than 4000-year-old Egyptian statue. The other is the reproduction of the music notebook into which, over 32 years, György Kurtág copied a succession of movements in the series of Games for Zoltán Kocsis. This notebook – Kocsis Zoli's manuscript book – is, even now, frequently performed by Kocsis.

Kurtág has a seventy-year composing career behind him. His output includes orchestral and chamber works, concertos, choruses, vocal and instrumental works. Over the past decades this enormous body of work has become more widely known. He is one of only a few of his contemporaries whose works are played not only in the isolated setting of contemporary music concerts and festivals, but which also form part of the mainstream concert repertoire.

Editio Musica Budapest (with the exception of a few compositions which appeared in the Viennese Universal Edition) has been his principal publisher for more than five decades which means an ongoing working relationship even today. Without the composer's collaboration the scores' publication would not be impossible, as would satisfying the international hunger for information about Kurtág's works. All of us working on the publication of his new scores and attending to the old ones request his help almost daily, and he too finds us immediately if he has any request. This joint labour is an exciting challenge and a constant learning process, both in a professional and personal sense. Alongside Kurtág, even with much knowledge and experience, you cannot but learn - not only about his music but more broadly about everything that is important in music and art.

Kurtág, even now at 90, is young at heart. In the last few years he has written numerous piano and chamber works, and in the summer of last year he celebrated his one-year-older, by then seriously ill colleague, Pierre Boulez, with a new orchestral work. Apart from all this, since 2010 he has been working on his life's greatest artistic undertaking: the opera Fin de partie after Samuel Beckett.

We wish him continuing activity and energy,

affectionately,

The UMPC team: Editio Musica Budapest - Durand-Salabert-Eschig -