This year, the 27th Milano Musica Festival – connected to Kurtág’s opera Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie, to be presented at La Scala on November 15th – focuses on the oeuvre of György Kurtág. From October 21st to November 26th, 22 concerts provide an overview of the composer's work: instrumental and vocal pieces, chamber and orchestral music. The festival presents Kurtág's conversations with his forerunners and contemporaries (Bach, Schubert, Bartók, Stravinsky, Ligeti) and the emergence of important topics of modernity in his art. In connection with the opera, special attention is paid to the works related to Beckett's writings, such as What is the Word or Pascal Dusapin’s Watt for trombone and orchestra.

Gergely Madaras with the Kurtág-couple and György Kurtág Jr.

At the opening concert, La Scala's orchestra was directed by Gergely Madaras. György Kurtág Jr., who also played on synthesizer, presented Zwiegespräch, written together with his father; the  original string quartet parts of Kurtág have been set for orchestra by Olivier Cuendet. In this composition – as one of the critics claimed – "two ways of thinking and performing music" came into dialogue with each other. Two days later Quartetto Prometeo performed Italian premiere of some compositions for string quartets (Secreta – In memoriam László Dobszay, Clov’s last monologue) besides Hommage à András Mihály – 12 microludes and 6 Moments musicaux.

György Kurtág Jr. and Gergely Madaras in La Scala (photo by Margherita Busacca)

In the forthcoming concerts in November there come performances of such well-known compositions like Messages of the Late R. V Troussova (sung by Natalia Zagorinskaya, directed by Andrea Pestalozza) and rarely heard works, such as the choir compositions Omaggio Luigi Nono and the Eight Choruses to Poems by Dezső Tandori (the vocal ensemble Les Cris de Paris is directed by Geoffroy Jourdain).

A vocal chamber concert with Sophie Klussmann encompasses almost four decades, presenting Seven Songs on poems by Amy Károlyi and Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern von Georg Friedrich Lichtenbergs, followed by Scenes from a novel. Particular attention should be paid to the concert of the RAI Symphony Orchestra, in which Heinz Holliger conducts Stele and Pierre-Laurent Aimard presents the world premiere of some piano pieces from the forthcoming 10th volume of Games for piano.