Born in Hungary in 1926, the free spirit György Kurtag cannot be assigned to any school or direction. The flutist Markus Brönnimann has collected all of his works for flute on a Tacet album.
This was certainly not an easy undertaking, as Kurtag’s associative musical language demands the highest technical precision and musical concentration from both the soloist and the accompanying musicians. On the other hand, the composer leaves a certain amount of freedom to the performers, as his music should always be open to new ideas and adaptations. His collections do not always form a coherent cycle; the pieces can be played in different sequences. On the other hand, the pieces on this album contain a labyrinth of connecting threads, either because they can be assigned to other instruments or because they have been reworked from the corpus of other works. All this becomes clear in the very detailed and excellently explanatory booklet text by Markus Brönnimann.
The fact that the music expresses a wealth of often contradictory musical messages, that what may seem technical also speaks a poetic language, is expressed in Brönnimann’s playing and that of his friends with whom he recorded the album. The result is a truly exciting confrontation, coupled with a performance of a very high standard.
Norbert Tischer<< back