Reviewed by Tamara Stefanovic – An inspiring and insightful program celebrating Kurtag in its 100th year | classical music

YYou can celebrate the 100th anniversary of György Kurtág’s birth with one of the Hungarian composer’s large-scale works – his monumental 1994 elegy, his first opera Fin de Partie based on Beckett (premiered in 2018 when the composer was 92), or the violent surrealism of 2003’s Concertante – but that would risk misunderstanding the genius of the “master of the miniature”, a musician at his best in economy, brevity and ephemerality. Fortunately, pianist Tamara Stefanovic had something else in mind.

Titled Labyrinth, Stefanović’s concert proposed an audio essay in which Kurtág’s short piano works (several of them from the ongoing Játékok series) were woven in and out of works by Debussy, Liszt and J. S. Bach. By performing this 90-minute cycle non-stop, smearing the edges between the pieces, Stefanovic paid tribute to a composer whose sonic world pulses with musical ghosts, extracting their echoes and revealing their palimpsest.

Bach’s early whimsy about the passing of his beloved brother – an unusual, programmatic series of musical tableaus – stares into the mirror of Kurtag’s mercurial Piano Eight, a slippery interplay of sounds in No. 3 that glances at Bach’s counterpoint (now receding into the mist), but also extends towards Debussy’s chalky impressionism. Apple Blossom (one of Játékok’s many musical games) was a Schumann or Mendelssohn ballad that veered off the path of homecoming, wandering straight into Liszt’s late Nuages ​​gris with a sleight of hand that made you doubt your ears. Surely these persistent, unresolved storm clouds belong to another century?

Not only did Stefanovic blurry repertoire, he also smudged the patterns. Kurtag was theatrical, almost romantic in the range of his gestures, and Debussy was all negative space and modernism. Her Bach, pedal-heavy, often strident, was not for everyone, but with so much musical aphorism and impermanence, you can understand Stefanovic portraying it as a ground wire, a thread through the maze.

Her decision to finish the work on the final “prick” book of The Art of the Fugue—which had been cut off suddenly in the place where Bach had left it unfinished—was inspired: a jagged, torn fragment of the book in real time. In pantomime, Kurtag saw Stefanović’s hands approach the keyboard by coda, before shyly darting away without making a sound. Wit and silence. The only possible Christmas tribute to a unique musical sound.