This release captures part of a concert given at New York's Carnegie Hall in January 2009; the concert was sponsored by the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York. Other pieces from the concert, featuring the same composers, are available elsewhere. But the program included here is nicely balanced between the two composers, György Ligeti and György Kurtág. Born within a few years of each other in the 1920s, they grew up in Bartók's long shadow but went in different directions, and their relationship is one of those that ...
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This release captures part of a concert given at New York's Carnegie Hall in January 2009; the concert was sponsored by the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York. Other pieces from the concert, featuring the same composers, are available elsewhere. But the program included here is nicely balanced between the two composers, György Ligeti and György Kurtág. Born within a few years of each other in the 1920s, they grew up in Bartók's long shadow but went in different directions, and their relationship is one of those that shows how closely opposites can be related. Ligeti's structures, whether in the instrumental Melodien (1971) with their tone clusters or the Cello Concerto (1966) with its drones, feature fragments that emerge from basically static backgrounds, generating an interplay of levels and planes that develop as a work or movement proceeds. Kurtág's music, by contrast, is spiky and abrupt. His Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova, Op. 17, is a collection of brief, often sardonic songs (in...
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