The three sections that make up Gyorgy Kurtag's Stele last just a quarter of an hour, barely the length of the first-movement exposition in some Mahler or Bruckner symphonies, yet it is a work conceived on an epic, authentically symphonic scale.
Completed in 1994, it was Kurtag's first orchestral piece for 40 years, yet uses the re sources of Mahler-sized orchestra complete with six flutes and Wagner tubas with total mastery; not a note is wasted nor a texture that is not perfectly imagined.
The slow-fast-slow scheme has exact weight and balance - from the microtonally shifting layers of the first section, through the scurrying Bartokian colours of the second to the more conciliatory lies of the third emerging out of airy chords that are suddenly extinguished, it traces a tense arc. If there is one work which epitomises Kurtag's eloquence it is this elegiac masterpiece.
Stele began the second of the City of Birmingham Symphony concerts in the South Bank's Kurtag celebration last night, in a tightly controlled performance under Sakari Oramo.
They brought another, earlier piece too: the Four Capriccios for soprano and chamber orchestra written in 1971 but then suppressed by the hyper-critical composer until he revised it in the late 1990s.
Thirty years on these settings of surrealist poems by Istvan Balint seem like precursors for Kurtag's later, more familiar vocal works - textures whose shards can cut like glass, rhythms that can buoy up the soprano or force her to the extremes of her technique. Anu Komsi coped with it all immaculately.
Between these two compressed gems came an exceptional performance of a work by the composer who was a model for the young Kurtag. Here Bartok's Third Piano Concerto belied its reputation as a bland, four-square work; the soloist Zoltan Kocsis charged the first movement with intense nervosity, gave every chord in the chorale that opens the central Adagio an individual, luminous colour, and generated irresistible energy in the finale.
Oramo and the CBSO matched his daring every step of the way; this really was a partnership of mutual respect and reinforcement.
