György Kurtág in 2018 at the Budapest Music Center for the premiere of his Fin de Partie opera. Photo by Akos Stiller for The New York Times.
In Tuesday’s (3/10) New York Times, Joshua Barone writes, “Deep into the night of György Kurtág’s 100th birthday, it was finally time for cake. A small crowd was gathered on Feb. 19 for a toast in the lobby of Müpa Budapest, where a concert had just been given in his honor. Kurtág, a quiet titan among living composers, sat in a wheelchair and scanned the scene … Virtually no composer has reached this age while still active … apart from the American avant-gardist Elliott Carter. Like Carter, Kurtág is a centenarian with little interest in retirement. Persisting after the death of his wife, Márta, with whom he was inseparable in life and art, and holding out as his hearing fades, he teaches as meticulously as ever, and writes music with the searching mind of a composer who may never be satisfied with his body of work…. Born to a Jewish Hungarian family in the Banat region, which had been ceded to Romania in the Treaty of Versailles, he repeatedly experienced the upheaval of shifting borders and revolution. He composed on both sides of the Iron Curtain and achieved worldwide fame with the globalization of classical music.”
