Rare Birds
The ultimate piano challenge: Four-hand requires two to play as one in Menilperformance test
Sarah Rothenberg and Marilyn Nonken
Gyorgy Kurtag
"We should trust the picture of the printed notes and let it exert its influence upon us. The graphic picture conveys an idea about the arrangement in time of even the most free pieces. We should make use of all that we know and remember of free declamation, folk-music parlando-rubato, of Gregorian chant, and of all that improvisational music practice has ever brought forth."
— Hungarian composer György Kurtág from his preface to his piano score Játékok (Games)
The first track of the 1996 ECM recording of Kurtág's Játékok, with both György Kurtág and wife Márta performing four hand and solo piano, lasts less than 30 seconds, and consists of just seven notes spread across the range of the piano. It's a composition that one person could perform solo, but Kurtág has arranged these seven notes for four-hand piano, that is, for two pianists sitting side by side at the piano playing from a single score.
As a result, interpreting and performing what are just a handful of notes becomes an physical challenge, requiring an almost telepathic type of communication between the two pianists.
Silence, and how silence shapes the playing of notes, is a crucial component in performances of this music.
Tuesday at The Menil Collection, pianist and Da Camera artistic and general director Sarah Rothenberg and pianist Marilyn Nonken bring György and Márta Kurtág's recording to life, performing it as a "composed program," together seated on a single bench, playing the same upright piano.
"This is actually the first time we're playing it," Rothenberg says. "We don't divide things up the way Márta and György divided up the solos (on the recording) . . . we divided them up much more evenly."
The recording of Játékok consists of 30 four hand and solo piano compositions by Kurtág with four Bach chorales interspersed evenly throughout the program. The title, Játékok, actually refers to eight volumes of piano pieces Kurtág composed between 1973 and 2009.
Of performing the four-hand pieces with Nonken, Rothenberg says, "We're really making musical phrases together, note-to-note. So it takes a real sense of listening. Being a musician involves listening as much as playing and bringing the audience along to listen with you."
Silence, and how silence shapes the playing of notes, is a crucial component in performances of this music.
"I think the importance of silence (in music) is greatly underestimated," Rothenberg says. "I think that's where the interpreter becomes so important. It's very hard to notate what goes on in silence. You (the performing musician) have to continue to listen . . . and it's the intensity of the listening between notes that often creates the power of the music."
"That's part of the uniqueness of Kurtág," Rothenberg continues. "The performer is required to kind of ask themselves why they're playing each note. And the answer is not a verbal answer with words. The answer is in how you play that note. And what its relationship is to the previous thing that you heard, whether it's another note or whether that note is simply coming out of silence."
On the ECM recording, immediately following track one, bursting forth like petals of a flower, is a four-hand transcription of the Bach chorale aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, one of four Bach chorales that appear over the course of the program. (It may not be coincidence that track one's title translates as, "Flowers we are, mere flowers, embracing sounds.")
A Masterful Choice
But why Bach? Why does his music appear so suddenly at the top of and then repeatedly throughout this "composed program"?
"The Bach moments are really what elevate this piece to another level," Rothenberg says. "They bring about this sense of timelessness and connections between the past and our present that are very moving.
"Kurtág himself has a very spiritual relationship with music. He approaches music with great reverence. The Bach preludes almost like prayers. It's a very moving thing, and it really does create this bridge between our modern moment and the music from the past, which is not in the past when we play it. It becomes our present."
"I continually to feel that one of the great, great powers of art is we don't have to live in our time," Rothenberg says. "We can live in any time.
Kurtág, a contemporary and friend of György Ligeti, and who named one movement in Játékok "Homage to Christian Wolff," never allied himself with one musical movement, be it avant-garde or whatever, in opposition to another. Music writer Alex Ross accurately describes Kurtág as, "A master of the art of neither-nor — a composer neither traditional nor avant-garde, neither nationalist nor cosmopolitan, neither tonal nor atonal."
Játékok speaks to the profound relationship Kurtág and musicians like Rothenberg and Nonken have with music of both the past and present.
"I continually to feel that one of the great, great powers of art is we don't have to live in our time," Rothenberg says. "We can live in any time. And that's what art brings to us. We live the Bach, but we live it in a very contemporary context when we hear it in the midst of these short themes by Kurtág."
György Kurtág: A Composed Program takes place at The Menil Collection, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday night. Tickets and more information are available at the Da Camera of Houston website.
