György Kurtág

I started to compose my piano pieces called Games in 1973. Until 1979, the publication of the first four volumes, these works existed only as manuscripts, on sheets of music paper. However, in 1974, I...

The piano series entitled Játékok/Games, written from 1973 onwards, was originally conceived as a piano method. As the years went by, the series lost its didactic character, and it came to be seen as...

In 1978, for the premiere of Hommage a Mihály András, György Kurtág visited Witten, and there he met the teachers of the Waldorf school in Witten-Herdecke. Commemorating this meeting, he created and d...

The work was dedicated to the Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and teacher Jen Takács (1902-2005) for his 100th birthday. The hitherto unpublished short piece will be premiered by the Staatskapel...

Publication of György Kurtág's string chamber music is a long-awaited event: his chamber music master courses and the recording made by the Orlando Trio have aroused considerable interest in these wor...

The premiere of the so called 'third string quartet' composed in 1988/89 was given on the 1989 Witten Festival in the rendering of the Auryn Quartet.

Signs, Games and Messages are series for solo instruments and small chamber ensembles. Each of the three notions refers to an essential factor in Kurtág s music. Signs ties it with the composer s peri...

Signs, games and messages are compositions of differing length, written for different occasions: musical letters, tributes, playful games with instrumental technique. In the past year pieces for violi...

Signs, games and messages are compositions of differing length, written for different occasions: musical letters, tributes, playful games with instrumental technique. In the past year pieces for violi...

For a Hungarian composer, writing music set to the poems of Attila József is no small feat. In this series, György Kurtág (* 1926) took on this immense challenge in a unique way even within his own oe...

Stele for large orchestra was commissioned by the Berliner Philharmoniker and has been dedicated to and premiered by Claudio Abbado and the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1994, in Kurtág's second year of...

Kurtág s newest orchestral work was commissioned by the Lucerne Festival on the occasion of Pierre Boulez s 90th birthday. It was first performed on 23 August 2015 by the Lucerne Festival Academy Orch...

The idea of composing 'Games' was suggested by children playing spontaneously, children for whom the piano still means a toy. They experiment with it, caress it, attack it and run their fingers over i...

Three old inscriptions, Op. 25 to a Hungarian folk text, words on a Transylvanian mangle and the epitaph of a young German girl in a Hungarian village cemetery, for soprano and piano (in Hungarian and...

Verlagskopie.

The first five items in the song cycle are settings of poems by the German Romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). The 6th movement is a commentary on Hölderlin s last years, on the still rele...