Because he composes so slowly and fastidiously, new scores from György Kurtág are always special events, and two in eight days is extraordinary.
The British premiere of ...pas à pas nulle part... at the Edinburgh Festival next Saturday will be part of a weekend of concerts celebrating Kurtág's achievement, while at the Proms last night the BBC Singers and Symphony Orchestra, under Martyn Brabbins, introduced to this country the latest work-in-progress.
Like so many of Kurtág's works, Messages is a collection of intensely compressed miniatures which has grown by accretion, building into a music statement 11 minutes long that has a far greater impact than the sum of its parts.
The heart of the work and its starting point is the two choral settings placed fourth and fifth in the sequence of six pieces - one sets an inscription found on a Cornish gravestone in rapt, slowly evolving phrases with minimal orchestral punctuation; the other simply consists of the words "Flowers there are", muttered in Hungarian by the chorus after the orchestra has provided the tersest of introductions.
The other movements are purely orchestral, none lasting more than a couple of minutes, written originally as tributes or memorials to friends. Each expresses in a few bars what any other composer (except perhaps Webern, Kurtág's main influence) would take pages to approach. The smallest gesture - a growling brass chord, exploding piano and gongs, a sweet-toothed violin solo evaporating in thin air -takes on huge significance.
Kurtág's world is terrifyingly exposed, its nerve ends raw, so that the few fleeting moments of consolation become all the more treasurable. It's music that fights against silence all the way; every note has to be fought for, every phrase earned.
Inevitably for a Hungarian composer of his generation, Bartók casts a huge shadow over Kurtág's early development, and there was Bartók in this concert too - the Third Piano Concerto, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard as the breathtaking soloist, floating the opening theme weightlessly over the strings, bringing intense luminosity to the piano chords of the nocturnal slow movement, and leading the orchestra with dazzling virtuosity through the helter-skelter of the finale. Brabbins ensured that every particle of the accompaniment made its mark.
In Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka, played in its original 1911 scoring, Brabbins was equally careful to evoke the surreal, neurotic world in vivid detail, just as at the beginning of the concert he teased out the churning textures of Rachmaninov's The Isle Of Dead (a curious work to find in this modernist company) with the right lugubrious inevitability.
