An evening with the Kurtags

Hiromi Kikuchi took the stage first of all, migrating from one side to the other as she pursued the racks of sheet music stretched across it. Her violin playing was steady and strong, some beautiful and some strange sounds coming out of Kurtag's Hipartita for violing solo. When the piece, a UK premiere, ended with two plucked notes, you somehow guessed this was the end, simply because it was so wilfully unclimactic.
Then an interval and Gyrogy and Marta Kurtag took to the stage. Married since 1947, they were performing G Kurtag's pieces for one or two pianists, Jatekok. Curiously they chose to play a muted upright, sitting with their backs to the audience, one occasionally standing to give the other free rein as soloist. G Kurtag is 80, his wife catching up, and the whole was very dear - the piece is sometimes abrasive but the playing was uniformally soft. Autumn turned the Wigmore Hall into a John Cage sonic landscape performance, the playing of the pianists mingling with prolonged coughs, rattles of water bottle lids, an emergency beeper - and on they played. I was intrigued as much as anything, like attending an octagenarian Noh performance in which little happened in a beautiful way. The piece was different to the recorded version I know, abbreviated and in a variant order, but they finished the main programme with the section I love most of all, perhaps of any piece - Kurtag's transcription of Bach's 'Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeite'. My attending the concert was largely to hear this piece performed, perhaps with a strong touch of seeing one of the living greats among composers (now his dear friend Ligeti has died, Kurtag is clearly the greatest living Hungarian composer - though somewhat dearly he never got real recognition till he was almost sixty). The piece started, I expected to tick it off - 'good, I heard it live' - when it broke me up. My evening ended in silent, grateful weeping, a gift of a musical epiphany. Somehow everyone seemed to leave the Hall gentler in some way, changed a little, carrying something of the kurtags' relationship with them.