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From the Cosmos to Kurtág: Happy Hundredth Birthday! New York
Alice Tully Hall
02/19/2026 -
Győrgy Kurtág: Brefs Messages, Opus 4 [1] – Kafka-Fragmente, Opus 24 (Parts III & IV) [2] – ...quasi una fantasia..., Opus 27, No. 1
Vincent Zhang: The Iron Mask (World Premiere)
Fantine Douilly [1], Kerrigan Bigelow [2] (Sopranos), Tianyou Ma (Violin), Heting Xia (Piano)
AXIOM , Jeffrey Milarsky (Conductor)
G. Kurtág/J. Milarsky(© BBVA/Peter Konerko)
“Everything that lives is in flux. Everything that lives emits sound. But we only perceive a part of it. We do not hear the circulation of the blood, the growth and decay of our bodily tissue, the sound of our chemical processes. They vibrate in response to their environment. This is the foundation of the power of music. We can set free these profound emotional vibrations. In order to do so, we employ musical instruments, in which the decisive factor is their own inner sound potential. That is to say: what is decisive is not the strength of the sound, or its tonal colour, but its hidden character, the intensity with which its musical power affects the nerves. [Music] must...elevate into human consciousness vibrations which are otherwise inaudible and unperceived... [bring] silence to life... uncover the hidden sound of silence.”
Franz Kafka
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is ... infinity.”
William Blake
The choice was less than agonizing. Last night’s St. John’s Cathedral concert was all Arvo Pärt, for his 90th birthday. Strings and voices would come soaring or whispering down the nave. Audiences could relax in their pews, let the Medieval-Modern liturgical chords sweep over them like an ambrosial balm. Like its subjects, it would be heaven.
Meanwhile, on New York’s Alice Tully Hall celebrated the 100th Birthday of the great Hungarian composer Győrgy Kurtág. No sweeping colors, no soaring prayers. Rather, Jeffrey Milarsky conducted Axiom, Juilliard’s students and grads which hinted, at ideas giving a patina, an epigrammatic notion and then moved on. A whisper, a percussive bang, a suspicion...and then something new.
Kurtág was my choice. I do love Arvo Pärt, but after one piece, I have to relax, listen to Muddy Waters or Fats Waller. The very brevity of Kurtág is its own reward. Like a single roe of caviar, you savor, swallow and want more.
Three weeks ago, pianist Leif Ove Andsnes played a half‑dozen Kurtág Games, and–like Yaweh blowing upon the figure of Adam–made them live. Last night, conductor Milarsky’s centenary birthday celebrations were wider in range and space, each preserved that extreme concentration of affinity for aphorism and puzzling fragmentation.
To whom can one compare Győrgy Kurtág? Musically, the durations might suggest Anton Webern. But Webern was so scrupulously controlled, that one listened to system, not notes. Take three or four measures of Glass or Feldman...but then you’re cursed to hear the whole piece.
Literature is far closer. Samuel Beckett’s paragraphs of hopelessness, Borges’ three‑page stories bringing us to exotic histories, Pinter’s silences, even Patricia Highsmith’s short stories which, in a few short paragraphs can lug us to unalloyed horrors.
The Kafka-Fragments were 20 sets of words, played by violin and soprano. Each was a hint of something larger. The ... quasi una fantasia... Op. 27, No. 1 was a spread of instruments over the whole Alice Tully Hall, yet we remembered the soft marimba and piano, the four short movements.
Kurtág is anything but horror. Two books of Kafka fragments from letters and diaries extreme in themselves, were sung and played by soprano Kerrigan Bigelow and violinist Tianyou Ma, with nuances of humor, with a tiny stamp for the word “Csardas”, with a plain line on “Coitus being punishment”. Kafka’s obsession with leopards actually had a violin running phrase. And the concluding “fragment” was actually a two‑minute drama with an O. Henry climax.
Well worth describing. Long long violin lines, disintegrating to bird chirps, while Ms. Bigelow sung about moonlit nights, birds shrieking with klezmer blues notes, Mr. Ma–whose string playing took on virtually every fiddle‑trick, never emphasizing virtuosity–played a short etude, and Ms. Bigelow calmly sung, “We crawled through the dust, a pair of snakes.”
Patricia Highsmith, eat your macabre heart out!
Why I am more attracted to Kurtág than Pärt is that Kurtág roams over the endless universe, telling you everything that space has to tell.
Kurtág takes what is impossible in any quantum physics. He says that the universe has no spaces. It’s all the same. And then Kurtág takes that “no‑space” (which is literally infinitely smaller than an atom) and dissects the “no‑space” in “no‑time.”
(Or, because audiences have paid for their seats, as short a “no‑time” as possible. With as much description as “no‑space” and “no‑time” can have.)
This was certainly true in ...quasi una fantastia... Op. 27, No. 1, which wasn’t an Opus at all, merely a misleading imitation of Beethoven’s “Moonlight”.
And here, finally. Space became spatial, like that of Varese. Heting Xia as the on‑stage pianist with onstage percussion. Basically slow scales to begin with, then colors from the orchestras in the balcony, and a third funereal movement.
The final movement, “Aria,” was like Mahler’s Abschied song. Barely moving the hint of a chorale, resonant with 18th Century recorders and soft harmonicas, and like the mythical repetition of time‑space itself, the piano with those descending scales.
The program was not totally Kurtág. The Canadian composer Vincent Zhang–who wrote brilliant program notes–presented The Iron Mass, a marvelous piece which was the opposite of Kurtág. The chamber orchestra let out all the stops, with solos, repetitions, loud and soft, and–compared to the rest of the concerts–was almost radiant in colors.
The sounds in front came from French soprano Fantine Douilly in a blinding‑red gown. And a deafening performance in the highest possible registers, with trills and talking. Her range was so great that one forgot the multiple layers of words. A medieval Hebrew philosopher bemoaning mankind, a form of the seven deadly sins. And the form of the Catholic Mass.
A formidable talent, yet somehow making phenomena out of the ephemeral.
The other Kurtág was Brief Messages with three consorts of three groups: brass, wind and strings. Again we had duets and trios, all playing separately.
To mere ears, they sounded like fragments. To those few of us who revere Győrgy Kurtág, the four short movements had no meaning all. Except fragments of unfinished dreams. Or perhaps, as Mr. Milarsky and the composer affirmed here, a barely seen speck with endless transformations.
Harry Rolnick
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