Kurtág 100 — 1

The first of two reports from Budapest

A thread of melody comes over the bus intercom as I’m about to step out. So familiar it sounds like a memory. And it really is a memory: György Kurtág’s memory of a colinda, an ancient winter song from Romania. It seems to have been used here as an attention-getting chime, to introduce a message. But I have to step down and go. And anyway, this is Budapest, so the message will be in Hungarian. Funny coincidence, though, because I’m here to attend two concerts to celebrate Kurtág’s hundredth birthday, both of them at Müpa, the Művészetek Palotája (Palace of Arts) in the south of the city, which opened twenty years ago and still looks spanking new, inside and out.

Now, as I write, those concerts have happened. The first, on the birthday itself, February 19, was beautifully planned to grow from piano pieces and transcriptions (played by Vikingur Ólafsson and his wife Halla Oddný Magnúsdóttir) through a chamber piece (Hommage à R. Sch.) to orchestral compositions smaller (…quasi una fantasia…, Grabstein für Stephan) and larger (Stele), then shrink all the way back and further to some of the same keyboard items on an upright piano—on, indeed, the very instrument that the Kurtágs, the composer and his late wife Márta, had played at Zankel Hall in 2009 and had signed when it was bought for the Budapest Music Center. The two pianists stood by it with the evening’s conductor, Markus Stenz, to take their final bows.