Handel and Kurtág
This Week in Classical Music: February 17, 2025. Handel and Kurtág. The good was born on February 23rd of 1685. In a single yr, between 1724 and 1725, whereas Handel was the “Grasp of the orchestra” on the Royal Academy of Music in London, he created three very profitable operas, Rodelinda, Giulio Cesare, and Tamerlano. Every of those operas had his favourite singers in main roles: the castrato Senesino, and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni. The aria Dove sei, amato bene? (The place are you, my pricey?), from Act I of Rodelinda was written for Senesino and is carried out right here by the fantastic countertenor Andreas Scholl. The supporting Accademia Bizantina is led by Ottavio Dantone.
Final week we celebrated the 98th birthday of Leontyne Value; this week it’s György Kurtág’s flip: in two days he might be 99! György Kurtág (his first title is pronounced nearer to Dyerd moderately than George) was born on February 19th of 1926 in Lugoj, Banat. A lot of the historic Banat now belongs to Romania, however earlier than the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918, Banat was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the vast majority of its inhabitants had been Hungarian audio system. It additionally had a big Jewish inhabitants; Kurtág himself is half-Jewish. He spoke Hungarian at dwelling and Romanian at college. As a toddler, he studied the piano on and off, first along with his mom after which with skilled lecturers. After WWII, in 1946, the 20-year-old Kurtág moved to Budapest and continued taking piano classes, ultimately getting into the Franz Liszt Music Academy. There he met György Ligeti they usually turned mates for all times (Ligeti, who died in 2006, was additionally of Hungarian-Jewish descent, and in addition born in part of Austria-Hungary that now lies in Romania; he rivals Kurtág as one of the vital vital classical composers of the second half of the 20th century). After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Kurtág moved to Paris. There he studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. He returned to Hungary in 1959 and stayed there in the course of the Communist regime – the one Hungarian composer of worldwide renown to take action (Ligeti, for instance, fled to Vienna proper after the failed revolution and stayed within the West for the remainder of his life). At the moment Kurtág turned influential as a instructor. Surprisingly, he didn’t train composition however moderately interpretation: pianists Zoltán Kocsis and András Schiff, and the primary Takács String Quartet had been amongst his pupils. Kurtág resumed touring solely after the autumn of communism in 1989, shifting first to Berlin (he was the composer in residence for the Berlin Philharmonic within the mid-90s), then Vienna, the Netherlands and Paris, the place he labored with Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain. In 2002, the Kurtágs settled in Bordeaux however in 2015 he and his spouse returned to Budapest (Kurtág’s spouse Márta, a pianist, died in 2019).
Final week, once we performed Luigi Nono’s Con Luigi Dallapiccola, we marveled at how a chunk of attention-grabbing music might be created by restricted means, in Nono’s case, an ensemble of percussion devices. Right here is one other instance, a chunk by Kurtág titled…quasi una fantasia… (Kurtág likes ellipses in his titles). It was written in 1988. Very completely different from Nono’s, it is usually very economical in how Kurtág makes use of completely different devices. The piano, for instance, works extra as a percussion, moderately than the Romantic instrument able to making a wall of sound. On this recording, Bahar Dördüncü is the pianist. We don’t know the title of the ensemble.
We must always point out Arcangello Corelli, who was born on this present day in 1653. And Luigi Boccherini was additionally born this week, on February 19th of 1743.
