Gyorgy Kurtag: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages. Compiled & ed. by Balint Andras Varga.
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ml/gcr014
ISSN1477-4631
Autores Tópico(s)Agriculture and Rural Development Research
ResumoThis book provides a fascinating and unique insight into the life, mind, and personality of the Hungarian composer György Kurtág (b. 1926). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kurtág has been resistant throughout his career not only to the notion of being interviewed, but also to articulating his own views and concerns through the medium of the written word. This volume, which usefully brings together the composer’s key statements concerning his own music and that of his great friend György Ligeti, is thus an important publication and will no doubt be of great benefit to the future study and understanding of his music. The basic premiss behind the set of three interviews presented here is intriguing. Varga explains in the Introduction to the book that in the late 1970s and 1980s he undertook a project that set out to ask three questions of eighty-two composers (subsequently published as Három kérdés nyolcvankét zeneszerzó (Budapest, 1986)). Centred on topics of influence and personal style, the three questions themselves were intentionally generic and relatively innocuous. In Kurtág’s case, however, they allowed Varga to probe into the mind of his subject for the first time. This initial interview, conducted over a three-year period, 1982–5, was subsequently followed up by two further encounters, in 1996 and 2007–8, with Varga using the same three questions as a basis for their discussions.
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