György Kurtág was born in 1926, the year in which Béla Bartók wrote the First Piano Concerto, the Piano Sonata and the Out of Doors suite for piano - a truly vintage year for twentieth century music. Lugos, Kurtág’s birth-place, is a town in Transylvania which was given to Romania as part of the treaty of Trianon in 1920, and although he regards himself as Hungarian, Kurtág was brought up to speak both Romanian and German as well as the original language of the area. It was not until after the war, in 1946, that Kurtág was able to move to Budapest where he became a student at the Liszt Academy of Music. Although he studied composition with both Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, his natural reticence about the quality of his own compositions led him originally to consider a career as a pianist. He studied chamber music under the legendary Leó Wiener, and piano under Pál Kadosa who taught so many of the highly talented younger generation of Hungarian pianists. For his final examination at the Academy in 1955, Kurtág performed his birth-year relation, Bartók’s Piano Sonata - a performance which the Hungarian musicologist, András Mihály praised as one of the finest he heard. Although it is obvious to those who know Kurtág, both as a composer and a teacher, that he is steeped in the Hungarian training that he received during his time at the Liszt Academy, he needed a catalyst to inspire and give him the confidence to actually take the uncomfortable path of composer. The catalyst was Paris. In 1957 he left Hungary to study with Marianne Stein and also to attend the classes of Mihaud and Messiaen. The effect of this time was intense and profound. He abandoned and rejected almost all of his earlier compositions and wrote a new work to which he gave the significant mark, Opus 1 - a String Quartet. This was follow by the Wind Quintet Op.2; Eight Piano Pieces Op.3; Eight Duets for Violin and Cimbalom Op.4 and Signs for Viola Op.5. All these works are characterised by austere, highly charged music in which, at the same time, every note assumes tremendous expressive importance.
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