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During this celebration of the 100th birthday of György Kurtág, a composer associated above all with what the concert’s presenter Tom Service called “intense quiet”, the occasional louder moments were breathtaking. There was a phrase in Víkingur Ólafsson’s piano arrangement of Bach’s Air on the G String that briefly bared its own musculature, as tenderly firm as a parent lifting a baby. There were a few snatched, jagged edges in Kurtág’s Hommage à R Sch when viola and clarinet snarled against Ólafsson’s silken piano. There was the fierce, impassioned opening of Mark Simpson’s Hommage à Kurtág. And there was the monumental Old Testament brass that boomed fleetingly across Kurtág’s … quasi una fantasia … Op 27 No 1 before dropping away to unveil a delicate skein of string harmonics.
Otherwise, this programme revelled in Kurtág’s many shades of pianissimo. Nine of his works – none lasting more than 10 minutes, most much shorter – were interspersed by comparably crystalline pieces by others (Schumann, Simpson, Webern, Bach). Ólafsson featured in most. Often bent deeply over the keyboard, he handled every barely audible note as if priceless.
Played at a muted upright piano alongside his wife, Halla Oddný Magnúsdóttir, the trills of Kurtág’s Twittering (from Játékok) were liquid oscillations, their quiet resonance left to ring into the start of Kurtág’s arrangement of a Bach chorale. Ólafsson’s bass was gauzy – keys barely struck – and Magnúsdóttir’s descant bell-like. Moving to a Steinway grand piano, Ólafsson spun an unbroken thread through a sequence culminating in Kurtág’s ethereally sparse arrangement of the slow movement of Haydn’s String Quartet in G major, Op 76 No 1 – a work stripped back to its expressive essentials.
In such company, Webern’s Passacaglia Op 1 sounded positively voluptuous: conductor Elena Schwarz and the Philharmonia musicians embraced its lingering memories of the Viennese beer hall and late-romantic Strauss. Performed by musicians scattered through the auditorium as well as on stage (Schwarz conducting in the round with impressive clarity), Kurtág’s … quasi una fantasia … was a thrilling experience of analogue surround-sound.
Through all this, the capacity audience sat utterly silent. Witnessing such intensity of musical expression is a rare treat; witnessing such intensity of listening, rarer still.
