Born in Romania to Hungarian parents, Gyorgy Kurtag moved in 1946 to Budapest, where he followed a musical path blazed earlier in the century by Bela Bartok. It was not until 1957, during a year of study in Paris, that Kurtag encountered the modern styles that had failed to penetrate the “Iron Curtain.” He took lessons from Messiaen and Milhaud, and he also transcribed many of Webern’s scores, gleaning that composer’s gifts of concision while mostly rejecting the underlying twelve-tone orthodoxy. Composed in 1988–89 in memory of the Hungarian composer Andreae Szervanszky, Kurtag’s Officium breve (Latin for “short service”) for string quartet compresses sixteen discreet sections into twelve minutes of haunting and unresolved contemplation.

Aaron Grad ©2019