Notes on the Program

by Aaron Grad

How can we, audience and performer, bring ourselves closer together, bridging the gap between the auditorium and the stage?

How can we rediscover the intimate dimension of certain pieces of music, far removed from the grand, demonstrative gestures of a repertoire designed to impress us?

How can we present and share works that, by their brevity and discretion, have no place in a traditional recital?

May this almost somnambulistic wandering invite us to greater closeness, intimacy, and a closer relationship with music from a secret garden.

                                                                        — Pierre-Laurent Aimard, on the program Intimacy

The letter arrived from Budapest a few weeks after Nuria Schoenberg Nono (the daughter of one famous composer, the wife of another) became a widow. Inside were condolences from a composer friend, in musical form: A Flower for Nuria. Four scattered notes, and then another four, slowly fading to silence. As it opens. And a second part, with identical notes in reverse order. The same as it closes.

This recital welcomes the audience inside a hidden world of private thoughts and personal connections. At the center of it is the Hungarian master of miniatures, György Kurtág (b. 1926), and a selection of his personal tributes — inside jokes, birthday wishes, and so many memorials — that he has penned over the decades and collected in volumes meant to be simple enough for children to play. On this program, his musical aphorisms stand in slanted dialogue with the kinds of spontaneous creations that made Schubert the life of the party in Vienna, at least in his own intimate circle. Mozart and Schoenberg, hallowed ghosts of Vienna’s twin ages of glory, make their own spectral appearances.

Born in Romania to Hungarian parents, Kurtág moved in 1946 to Budapest, where he followed a musical path blazed earlier in the century by Béla Bartók. It was not until 1957, during a year of study in Paris, that Kurtág 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.

Back in Hungary, Kurtág settled into a career as a respected piano teacher and vocal coach, but by 1968 he had lost faith in his direction as a composer. After five years of barely composing at all, his breakthrough came in 1973 when a colleague invited him to contribute to a collection of piano pieces for children. Ever since, the short and whimsical piano works he has collected under the title Játékok (Games) have formed the core of his output, with the collection growing to including more than 400 pieces as of the most recent publication of Volume X, when Kurtág was 95. (And there could be more coming; he is still actively composing at the age of 100.)

Writing in the preface to the first four volumes in 1979, Kurtág explained, “The idea of composing Játékok was suggested by children playing spontaneously, children for whom the piano still means a toy. They experiment with it, caress it, attack it, and run their fingers over it. They pile up seemingly disconnected sounds, and if this happens to arouse their musical instinct they look consciously for some of the harmonies found by chance and keep repeating them.”

Many selections are notated in open-ended ways that shape the gestures without locking the pianist into specific pitches. Falling asleep from Book I, for instance, places large circles on the staves to give an approximate range of pitch clusters that steadily descend toward slumber. To the budding pianist who might be daunted by these strange little pieces, Kurtág offers this encouragement: “Let us tackle bravely even the most difficult task without being afraid of making mistakes: we should try to create valid proportions, unity and continuity out of the long and short values — just for our own pleasure!”

Pleasure is the perfect place to bring in Franz Schubert (1797-1828), a native son of Vienna whom the public never really understood or appreciated during his short life. It was the friends in Schubert’s tight social circle who sustained his career, sung his praises, and watched in horror as this gregarious young man brimming over with wild ideas succumbed to syphilis at the age of 31. For all that Schubert dreamed of composing operas and presenting grand symphonies, the only real outlet he managed to develop in his lifetime was publishing music for amateurs to enjoy at home. Besides the 600-plus songs that were his main calling card, he wrote about 400 dances for piano, many of which originated as improvisations at the frequent parties where he held court from the keyboard. This was right when the waltz was catching on as the quintessential dance of Vienna, with its gliding steps and dizzying whirls that squeezed close-held partners into titillating embraces.

Schubert was the first composer in Vienna to fill collection after collection with dances labeled as waltzes. But music constructed of simple, repeating phrases in that same three-beat dance pattern had been around for ages, whether it was called a ländler (the ubiquitous folk dance of Austria), or a Deutsche (“German dance”), as was common when Schubert’s hero Mozart had walked those same streets 40 years earlier. Schubert applied all of these terms to his dances somewhat interchangeably, and the labels that ended up on the published scores didn’t necessarily match the manuscripts he submitted.

Some of the dances heard here date from when the teenaged Schubert was working full-time as a teaching assistant and taking composition lessons twice a week from Antonio Salieri. Others came later, like the Valses sentimentales that he composed in 1823 — an agonizing year when he suffered from the telltale early symptoms of syphilis and faced the fatal implications. He channeled his anguish into certain pieces from that time, but in these sweet and sunny waltzes, the party goes on.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) makes his appearance through one of the loveliest curiosities in his catalog, the Adagio for Glass Harmonica (played here on piano) that he wrote in the last year of his life. It was an instrument that had been invented in London 30 years earlier by none other than Benjamin Franklin, who was fascinated by the ethereal sound of a finger being rubbed around the rim of a wine glass, giving him the idea for an instrument of concentric glass bowls rotating on a pedal-operated spindle. Mozart knew the instrument through his friendship with Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (from whom we get the verb “mesmerize”), who used it in his hypnotherapy healing sessions. This particular piece came about after Mozart heard a young blind woman give a haunting performance on the instrument in Vienna; he wrote her both this solo and a piece of chamber music.

With barely any formal training, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) became an unlikely thought leader in fin-de-siècle Vienna, attracting a group of followers who collectively came to be known as the “Second Viennese School.” Schoenberg had grand ambitions to shape the course of music as dramatically as those earlier Viennese composers — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert — who forged what we now call the Classical style. He viewed the rules and norms of tonal harmony that had built up over centuries as needless limitations, and he sought to free music from that hierarchical system favoring some combinations of notes over others. Long before he developed his twelve-tone system as an alternative logic for organizing a composition, he experimented with escaping tonality purely through intuition. The Sechs kleine Klavierstücke (Six Little Pieces) for piano from 1911 constituted an important experiment early in that quest, using brevity to obviate the need for harmonic development. He wrote five of the pieces in a single day, and later added the sixth as he grieved the death of a friend and fellow composer in Vienna, Gustav Mahler, who in his own way had chased the end point of music’s old world order. Schoenberg, a maximalist at heart, didn’t continue down the path suggested by the Six Little Pieces, but his student Webern did his life’s work in that microscopic domain, lighting a way for Kurtág.

In a selection from Book III of Játékok, Kurtág paid tribute to the late Hungarian mathematician Rózsa Péter, a founding mother of recursion theory. The music is structured around a layer that trickles steadily down the chromatic scale, passing through each of the piano’s 88 keys; the other layer is a disjointed chain of sustained notes and chords that grow denser and more agitated, until they settle on a high cluster. He named the piece after her breakthrough book, a title that could apply to all of these wondrous trifles that make the most of precious time: Playing with Infinity.

© 2026 Aaron Grad