...Quasi una fantasia...

This programme takes the listener on an adventurous journey through the musical mind of György Kurtág. His Játékok is a growing collection of compositions and textfragments. It is centered around the joy of playing and of movement in a very serious way. Kurtág writes: ‘Let us use all our knowledge and all our memories of…everything that improvised music has ever created’. But it is Kurtág’s transcriptions of works by Johann Sebastian Bach that form the cornerstones of this recording and teach us to listen to these masterpieces with new ears. At the heart of the programme we hear Schubert’s renowned Fantasie, probing the borders of sonata form with the irrefutable logic of a sleepwalker in a feverish stream of music. Like Schubert, Kurtág is one of the few composers who possesses the secret of the music innate in words. Farewells, suffering and death all play a central role in Kurtág’s work. He describes his work as a ´continuing quest´, which is reflected in the remarkable combination of works on this recording. It can be listened to as a daring and loving struggle with time — a description also applicable to Kurtág’s work.