Kurtag: Akhmatova Poems, Splinters, Troussova Messages live from Carnegie Hall Jan 31, 2009

If you're not familiar with Gyorgy Kurtag, 

Hurry Up Please Its Time .

Eotvos Conducts Kurtag at

 Carnegie Hall, 2009

Peter Eötvös,conductor

Natalia Zagorinskaya, soprano 

Katalin Károlyi, mezzo-soprano

Ildikó Vékony, cimbalom

Miklós Perényi, cello 

UMZE Ensemble

Amadinda Percussion Group

Zankel Hall, New York City

(alt. art thanks to Arno)

January 31st, 2009

MR3 Bartók Radio internet stream 320 kbit/s

recorded and uploaded by KaKa (thank for the good s.. uh, stuff)

The concert included Ligeti performances, which KaKa has linked in the comments.

Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova, Op. 17

Splinters, Op. 6c

Four Poems by Anna Akhmatova, Op. 41- World Premiere:

• I. Pushkin (1997) pour soprano solo, dédié à Natalia Melnikova.
  
• II. Alexandru Bloku (1997) pour soprano solo.
  
• III. Plach - Prichitanie (1997), pour soprano et instruments, dédié à Márta Papp.
  
• IV. Voronezh (in progress), pour soprano et ensemble.
  

Kurtag's music is mostly super short pieces, linked together by many levels of connective tissue. Perfect for the ADHD set hungry for depth. Any given piece feels like an emotional snapshot; it gives some mechanism of my inner life expression in a quick, immediate and faithful language. It feels right.

Bruce Hodges from MusicWeb International's site had some illuminating comments on this concert. Calling the first part "uncompromising", He writes about "Messages of the Late R. V. Troussova, a 21-song cycle using wrenching, hallucinatory texts by Rimma Dalos, a Russian poet living in Hungary.  When soprano Natalia Zagorinskaya began "Odinochestvo" ("Loneliness"), her voice seemed a bit small for the job.  But then it turned out that her wan tone, capped with a desolate glissando at the end, was merely her strategy for the opening, rather than revealing all of Kurtág's colors at once. 

The cycle grows progressively stranger, with a cumulative effect that is harrowing.  The introduction to "Chastushka" (which begins, "Bite me on the head, bite me on the breast!") sounds like a deranged marching band.  The composer sets "Great misery—that's love.  Is there any greater happiness?" with delicate cimbalom strokes, as if the words would somehow be comforting.  "Kameshki" ("Pebbles") uses kaleidoscopic instrumental colors to depict the stones, and in "Tonkaia igla" ("A slender needle"), the effect is piercing, like glass breaking.  Ms. Zagorinskaya was in complete control of Kurtág's unconventional meldings of music and text, and the UMZE Ensemble provided exquisitely calibrated touches of sound—truly, sometimes that's all they were—to assist her.

In what may have been the night's sleeper hit, Ildikó Vékony gave a virtuoso performance of Splinters, originally conceived for guitar and adapted for cimbalom.  In four compact movements totaling seven minutes, it covers a huge array of textures, before reaching a haunting ending with a low D, repeated softly as it fades into the distance.  Ms. Vékony's concentration on the instrument was almost supernatural.  Only after a respectful silence at the end did the audience break out into whoops of delight.  As she took her curtain calls she seemed slightly stunned, as if she didn't quite know what she had accomplished.

Ms. Zagorinskaya and the UMZE musicians returned for the world premiere of Four Poems by Anna Akhmatova, written over the span of a decade.  It is brief, gossamer and adds a huge array of percussion instruments to the chamber ensembl

e.  The final song, "Voronezh," incorporates a whip and a siren to evoke "…a whole town…encased in ice…Trees, walls, snow, as if under glass."

Two sorta violin concertos played live: Eotvos' "Seven" and Vaughan Williams' "The Lark Ascending"

Intense, Singing Strings (and some other stuff)

at the service of Eotvos and Vaughn Williams

Peter Eotvos
Seven
(UK Premiere)

Ralph Vaughan Williams
The Lark Ascending
(Never played in England before)

Susanne Mälkki - conductor
Philharmonia Orchestra
Akiko Suwanaï - violin

from the Proms 2008 concert
Royal Albert Hall, London, England
27 August 2008

The 2008 Proms 55 included one of those new compositions that caught me immediately, like some of Kurtag's work does, even though this is longer. Peter Eotvos' "Seven" thus runs the usual danger for me of longer pieces where I drift off a bit, yet the instrumental and ensemble lines that emerge are perenially compelling and sometimes transporting one to another plane (more on why that may be below.) Seven can be thought of as a sort of violin concerto.
The Lark Ascending is just plain beautiful music. This performance is wider reaching than most of the usual benchmark rec's under Sir Adrian Boult and, I think, Bryden Thompson.

Fiona Maddocks of London's "The Evening Standard" has more details about the performance, especially regarding Eotvos, who
"should have been at the Proms directing the UK premiere of Seven, his violin concerto commemorating the Columbia space shuttle astronauts who died in 2003. But illness prevented him and the fast-rising Finnish conductor, Susanna Mälkki, stepped in at short notice, drawing playing of flair and subtlety from the Philharmonia.

Eötvös’s two-movement elegy, with soloist Akiko Suwanai, launches straight in on high, with stratospheric violin textures offset by ensemble sounds so tantalising you have to scrutinise each player to work out how the effect is made. Since a keyboard sampler forms part of the mix, you often remain merely bewitched and bewildered.

Creating an unsettling impact, six violinists were positioned around the Albert Hall, their solo voices speaking in signal and response to Suwanai, who continued her journey of poetic rhapsody alone on stage. The sense of figures lost in space was only too vivid, and expertly performed by all.

Suwanai then brought her fluid, seemingly weightless playing to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. Judging by the large audience this season, Proms director Roger Wright is proving himself an ingenious programme maker. Whether the words “Classic FM” are ever said aloud within the walls of Radio 3 is doubtful, but it won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that The Lark Ascending heads that other station’s Hall of Fame list. To programme this glorious piece of English pastoral next to the Eötvös premiere was nifty, to say the least."


(the program that evening included Ravel's
Scheherazade (w/Sarah Connolly) and Daphnis et Chloe, and Debussy's Prelude a l'Apres-Midi d'un Faune.)



This thanks to fadoze, master of dimeadozen broadcasts, it forms part of his recording #FA2008-179.