Review: "a duo of like minds" - Homage a Kurtág - Feb 2026 - Art Song Canberra

Homage to Kurtág
Art Song Canberra
Embassy of Hungary
3.00 p.m., February 15, 2026
★★★★★

Kurtág’s terseness involves a strongly emotional punch, underscored by his spare, often dissonant setting of aphoristic texts.

Among Canberra’s cultural assets are the elegant buildings of its embassies. Hungary’s embassy has a soaring Millennium Hall, with ceiling panels recalling great milestones of the country’s last eleven centuries. Here, Art Song Canberra celebrated the centenary of the birth in Transylvania of one of Hungary’s leading composers: György Kurtág. Kurtág came slowly to composition, only hitting a truly international stride during the 1970s. Indeed, his first opera, Fin de partie (End Game, after Samuel Beckett’s theatre piece) was only premiered in 2018. Kurtág’s second century starts Thursday, February 19, amid extensive celebrations, especially in Budapest and Transylvania’s main city, Cluj (Kolozsvár).

Along with other Transylvanian-born composers such as György Ligeti and Péter Eötvös, Kurtág perpetuated the stylistic legacies of Bartók and Kodály, but then increasingly looked to the miniaturist tendency of the Austrian Anton Webern. Kurtág sought to capture “the biggest emotions in the smallest, most concentrated musical gestures”. Hence, Sunday’s volley of short, even fragmentary pieces by soprano Amy Moore and pianist Edward Neeman.

Kurtág’s terseness involves a strongly emotional punch, underscored by his spare, often dissonant setting of aphoristic texts. The critic Benjamin Ivry well described him in 2009 as a “once-off individualist”, explaining that “Kurtág puts notes in unusual and unexpected places, and no one can imitate his compositional style”. The text of the second, “Balance”, of his Seven Songs (1981), says it all: “Excess and restraint: these two will in the end tear me in two.” Or this set’s last song, “Ars Poetica”: “Climb carefully and slowly, snail; steady as you go, up the slope of Mount Fuji,” which showed Kurtág’s occasional love of less jangling note games. Darker in mood was a snatch from a “Fragment” of the short-lived Attila József (1905–1937): “Amazed am I, that I shall die.” Three Old Inscriptions (1987) spills across five centuries as well as old German-language and Hungarian folk texts in its tight expressions of burial grief.

Amy Moore and Edward Neeman rose to all technical demands of this craggy music, with its unexpected leaps, turns, and mood clashes. They presented as a duo of like minds. Admirable also was Moore’s Hungarian pronunciation, learnt especially for this homage, and the ever-attentive dynamic contrasts of Neeman at the keyboard, whether in solo or duet roles. Their broader performing skills were, however, also demonstrated during this recital by the other two works that filled out this Homage program. The introductory Three Melodies (1930) of a young Olivier Messiaen showed the lighter, and French, side of Moore’s soprano profile, while she was perhaps most at home in Schumann’s extensive Woman’s Love and Life cycle, in German, with a story stretching from love at first sight to “the sleep of death”.

While this audience clearly most appreciated Schumann’s less fractured early-romantic masterpiece, it is good that Art Song Canberra—once, the ACT Lieder Society—mounted this centennial exploration of Kurtág’s contribution to the song medium. These pieces are rarely played in Australia, but are important to music’s course in the way they introduce repertory that itself musically laughs, murmurs or cries, rather than simply evokes these emotions in us. The extensive program notes aided this comprehension, and the role of sound and notation in Kurtág’s art. As they explained, “playing is just playing”, and hence the wonderful selection of solo piano works called “Játékok” (“Games”, in Hungarian) which periodically punctuated this program in Edward Neeman’s acrobatic hands. It made me wonder whether a short piano work by Brisbane-born Brett Dean, “Homage à Kurtág” (2010), might find another outing soon.

Malcolm Gillies is a musicologist and retired vice-chancellor, now living in Canberra.