You could mark György Kurtág’s 100th birthday with one of the Hungarian composer’s large-scale works – the monumental 1994 elegy Stele, his Beckett-based debut opera Fin de partie (premiered in 2018 when the composer was 92), or the violent surrealism of 2003’s Concertante – but that would risk misunderstanding the genius of “the master of the miniature”, a musician at his truest in economy, brevity, provisionality. Luckily, pianist Tamara Stefanovich had something else in mind.
Titled Labyrinth, Stefanovich’s recital proposed an essay in sound in which Kurtág’s short piano works (many from ongoing series Játékok) were woven into and out of works by Debussy, Liszt and JS Bach. Performing this 90-minute cycle without pause, smudging the edges between pieces, Stefanovich paid homage to a composer whose sound world is alive with musical ghosts, drawing out its echoes and exposing its palimpsests.
