Some years ago I was at the Royal Opera House, watching and listening with a growing sense of disbelief and horror as a contemporary opera entirely failed to understand or meaningfully capture the source material upon which it was based. That was Thomas Adès’ wretched The Exterminating Angel, an embarrassingly…
Tag:
György Kurtág
-
-
i’m really not a conductor fanboy. Composers are always getting me excited; performers too, from time to time; but conductors, in general, not so much. There are some special cases: Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Chailly have both stunned me on countless occasions; i’ve always had a lot of time for…
-
For about as long as many people can remember, Romanian composer György Kurtág has been working on his first opera, based on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. It’s been announced, postponed, re-announced and re-postponed to the point where one begins to wonder if it will ever become a reality, but if all goes…
-
It was many, many years ago (at the 1993 Meltdown Festival, in fact) that i first encountered the music of Romanian composer György Kurtág and became instantly entranced by it. Like Webern, Kurtág is drawn to expressing himself in tiny, fleeting musical acts for modestly-sized instrumental groupings, but unlike Webern…
-
A profound sense of melancholic introspection pervades the next piece in my Lent series, György Kurtág‘s song cycle Scenes From a Novel. Kurtág composed the work in 1982, setting 14 texts by the Russian writer Rimma Dalos, texts that are in perfect sympathy with the composer’s penchant for exceptionally short…