Kurtág / Ligeti: Music for Viola Kim Kashkashian

• 1In Nomine - all'ongherese04:39
• 2Csendes sorok Dobszay Lászlónak _ Silent Lines to László Dobszay01:38
• 3Levél Ligeti Verának _ Letter to Vera Ligeti02:01
• 4Zöld erdobol magyar nóta - A 60 éves Földes Imrének _ For Imre Földes at 6001:30
• 5Kromatikus feleselos _ Chromatically saucy01:20
• 6Virág Zsigmondy Dénesnek _ A Flower for Dénes Zsigmondy02:30
• 7In memoriam Blum Tamás02:10
• 8In memoriam Aczél György00:58
• 9H.J.-nóta _ J.H.-Song01:04
• 10Vagdalkozós _ Beating00:28
• 11The Carenza Jig00:51
• 12Kroó György in memoriam03:42
• 13Hommage à John Cage01:21
• 14Doloroso Garzulyéknak _ For the Garzulys01:37
• 15Perpetuum mobile01:08
• 16Jelek I _ Signs I00:55
• 17Jelek II _ Signs II00:42
• 18Four Entwined Bodies - to the Exhibition by Sári Gerlóczy00:32
• 19Panaszos nóta02:03
• 20Sonata for Viola Solo 1. Hora lunga05:23
• 21Sonata for Viola Solo 2. Loop02:36
• 22Sonata for Viola Solo 3. Facsar06:17
• 23Sonata for Viola Solo 4. Prestissimo con sordino01:46
• 24Sonata for Viola Solo 5. Lamento03:46
• 25Sonata for Viola Solo 6. Chaconne chromatique04:03
• Total Runtime55:00

Info for Kurtág / Ligeti: Music for Viola

Kim Kashkashian has long been one of the most outstanding protagonists of modern composition and this bold and subtle account of solo music by the great Hungarian composers Kurtág and Ligeti is a landmark recording. Kurtág’s Signs games and Messages (1989- in progress) in its nineteen aphoristic sections is as demanding as Ligeti’s Sonata for viola (1991-94), but Kashkashian surmounts the very different challenges of the works, and points towards the qualities that unite these composers. As ever, she gets to the heart of the music, and unravels its secrets.

György Kurtág (b. 1926) and György Ligeti (1923-2006) were friends, for more than sixty years. “For a long time, a lifetime, Ligeti led me onward,” said Kurtág. “I followed him—sometimes right behind him and other times years or even decades later. I call it my ‘Imitatio Christi’ syndrome. The first years of our friendship were marked not only by his intellectual leadership. I oriented my taste according to his example.”

Yet how different are their respective oeuvres: Ligeti vastly prolific, Kurtág parsimonious in his productions, strongly self-critical, determined to justify every note (“Every tone has to be deserved”). For parallel artistic allies one might have to look beyond music: to literature perhaps, to Joyce’s cascading riverrun of language and Beckett grimly squeezing drops of inspiration from a dry sponge. Kurtág and Ligeti had a similar aesthetic relationship: sharing a nationality – and a “mother tongue” in Bartók – their contrasting temperaments took them to different places. Ligeti’s frame of reference can be encyclopaedic, in the space of a single composition alluding to higher mathematics and folk dance and welcoming any resultant “strangeness”, Kurtág always more aphoristic, cryptic, terse, has built a halting language out of miniatures, works which seem to take on a new intensity when sequenced. His works can be quietly eruptive: Peter Eötvös once referred to Kurtág as “a very shy volcano”, a characterization that catches both the charm and force of his work.

György Ligeti appreciated the dark sounds of the viola, in his introduction to the Sonata he wrote, “The viola is seemingly just a big violin but tuned a fifth lower. In reality the two instruments are worlds apart. They both have three strings in common, the A, D and G string. The high E-string lends the violin a powerful luminosity and metallic penetrating tone which is missing in the viola. The violin leads, the viola remains in the shadow. In return the low C-string gives the viola a unique acerbity, compact, somewhat hoarse, with an aftertaste of wood, earth and tannic acid.”

The present album, recorded at the Propstei St Gerold in May 2011, finds Kashkashian exploring and contrasting the solo viola works of Kurtág and Ligeti. Kaskashian and producer Manfred Eicher determined the dramaturgical sequence of the present version of “Signs, Games and Messages” which leads naturally toward the Ligeti Sonata. Sandner: “In Kashkashian’s scrupulous reading, the Kurtág.

Kim Kashkashian: viola

Recorded May 2011, Propstei St. Gerold
Tonmeister: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

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Booklet for Kurtág / Ligeti: Music for Viola