Recently, three CDs with György Kurtág’s chamber works have been published. One features Heinz Holliger playing Kurtág’s and his own pieces for oboe, while the other two comprise Kurtág’s vocal music: one of them with the specialist Susan Narucki, the other with the debuting Viktoriia Vitrenko. The three recordings have already been widely reviewed; some of the reviews are quoted below.

Holliger was 80 last month, and ECM, which has recorded so many of his works, has marked the occasion with Zwiegespräche (Dialogues). It’s a collection mostly of miniatures, almost all including oboe, by Holliger and his kindred musical spirit, György Kurtág. Both Holliger and Kurtág studied with the Hungarian Sándor Veress, and have always shared a fondness for spare, aphoristic musical statements, so that these pieces form a stylistically coherent sequence. The pieces by Kurtág include movements for solo contrabass clarinet, and soprano and oboe, as well as the many pieces that he has composed for Holliger, including two that he wrote around the time of the death of Holliger’s harpist wife Ursula in 2014. In every piece the music is pared back to its barest essentials, so that a single pitch or interval acquires huge expressive importance. It all makes a marvellously austere birthday tribute, with Holliger at the centre of things as a performer too; it was recorded last year and his oboe playing has lost none of its authority and peerless musicianship.

(Andrew Clements, The Guardian)

This disc celebrates the 80th birthday of Heinz Holliger, and although it explores his interpretative gifts as a performer rather than his full range as a composer, its focus on the dialogues between his own music and that of György Kurtág makes for a beautifully rounded double portrait. That this is an intensely intimate retrospective is clear from the very first item: Kurtág’s gentle, heartfelt tribute to Holliger’s harpist wife Ursula, who died in 2014. Its poignancy is all the greater since it sounds almost like an impersonation of one of Elliott Carter’s late instrumental miniatures – and Carter, who wrote so memorably for both the Holligers, had himself died just a few months before. But Kurtág, like Holliger, owes even more to the astringent yet profoundly lyrical expressiveness of Webern, and this quality often surfaces, sometimes with touches of un-Webernian irony, in works like Kurtág’s Hommage à Elliott Carter and … (Hommage à Tristan), which condenses Wagner’s sublime five-hour portrayal of death and transfiguration into a mere 40 seconds for oboe and bass clarinet. As you might imagine, every note counts!

(Arnold Whittall, Gramophone)

The lonely shepherd on the beach, waiting for the beloved, blowing on the double-reed, calling, plaintive: bucolic associations of this kind go through your mind, from the first note, a letter from afar, the György Kurtág in memory of the 2014 deceased Harpist Ursula Holliger wrote. Her husband, Heinz Holliger, intones this piece on the oboe heartbreakingly elegiac. No coincidence, if we encounter a similar mood several times among the 37 tracks of this CD. Often it is about memories of the deceased, tributes to friends, reminiscences of music history, very touching, calling, conjuring, mournful, sometimes indelicate, sometimes in dark colors. Dialogue is the name of the CD that the label ECM dedicates to Holliger for his 80th. On the cover appear both, Holliger and Kurtag’s name. It is the testimony of a long artistic friendship. This very coherent CD tells about it. And if one thinks the whole thing sounds very homogeneous, one discovers nuances, mysterious ones. So sometimes the pieces go back and forth between the two.

(Thomas Mayer, Schweizer Musikzeitung)

Holliger and Kurtág, Kurtág and Holliger: despite all the differences in their career and their work, there are many kinships. Both had Sándor Veress as master, one in Hungary, the other in Switzerland. Two substantial works by Holliger cope with a multitude of short works by the two composers. Those of György Kurtág come for many Signs, games, and messages, an extension for other instruments of the most famous Games (Játékok) for piano, including some recent and unpublished works to the disc. Kurtág and Holliger are not alone on this record: it is a living history of the music that is there with them, the English horn of the third act of Tristan, the introductory solo of the Rite of Spring, and much more. Holliger’s and Kurtág’s works are inhabited by pain and loss; this record bears witness to this, but it also strikes by its fullness of sound and expressive richness.

(Dominique Adrian, www.resmusica.com)

The soprano Susan Narucki has been an unflinching champion of a huge range of contemporary music, but the vocal works of György Kurtág have always had a central place in her repertoire. Her collection is based around two of Kurtág’s greatest vocal works, Scenes from a Novel, on texts by the Russian poet Rimma Dalos, and the Attila József Fragments. It’s music that demands the most scrupulous attention to detail. “Every piece of information on the page is essential” says Narucki, and her performances convey that sense of having overlooked nothing, while always preserving the expressive freedom and intensity that are such a vital part of Kurtág’s writing. As well as the major Dalos and József cycles, Narucki also sings the much more compact group of Dalos settings, Requiem for the Beloved, which along with the Three Old Inscriptions, have just piano accompaniment, and are the nearest things here to conventional songs. The four numbers in Requiem last barely five minutes, yet they map an emotional journey just as vividly as many cycles 10 times as long. Narucki’s wonderfully subtle shading and control registers each twist and turn in the journeys of every one of these songs. The whole disc provides total immersion in Kurtág’s utterly distinctive world, one in which nothing is taken for granted and even the smallest detail is conferred with profound, totally compelling meaning.

A performance of Scenes from a Novel, with Viktoriia Vitrenko as the soprano, is also the first work on Scenes, a Kurtág collection from Audite. The Seven Songs and In Memory of a Winter Evening are also common to both discs, but Vitrenko’s contributions also include the first-ever recording of Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Scrapbooks, settings of aphorisms by the 18th-century satirist, in which the soprano is supported by just a solo double bass. Vitrenko is a cooler, less expressively generous interpreter than Narucki, but her disc is invaluable nevertheless; it fills in another small gap in our knowledge of one of the greatest composers of our time.

(Andrew Clements, The Guardian)

In recent decades, Kurtág's oeuvre has slowly but surely been discographically disclosed, but apparently a few things remain to be discovered, witness these two new editions with cyclical works for soprano and instruments. Of course, we also find pieces that have already been recorded several times, and both CDs overlap in the Scenes from a Novel, Seven Songs, and Memory of a Winter Sunset. The American soprano Susan Narucki tells how she studied these works together with Kurtág. Obviously, you can hear that she has now passed sixty, but that does not detract from the intensity of her interpretation and the meticulous care for the detail that Kurtág drilled into it in long sessions. The twenty Attila József Fragments for soprano solo provide a wonderful example. Viktoriia Vitrenko is at the start of her career. The "selling point” of this CD is the first recording of the Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs, a cycle of ironic aphorisms of the German poet Lichtenberg (1742-1799). Vitrenko has taken a golden hold for her partner on the double bass: none other than Niek de Groot, former solo bassist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, takes care of this caninely difficult party, and how! The CD is more than worth the effort for this work alone, but that is just the beginning. Vitrenko not only has a beautiful voice, a formidable technique, she is also a gifted singing actress.

(Siebe Riedstra, www.opusklasiek.nl)

In addition to new interpretations of already well-documented works, 22 settings of Lichtenberg suddle books will be presented for the first time on this CD. Kurtag is the composer who wrestles for every note, which has an ethical aspect for him; he wants to be responsible for his notes. Another important feature is the closeness to the human voice, which is also expressed in most of the works here. And last but not least, the opening scenes of a novel are characterized by the use of genuinely Hungarian instruments, soprano, violin, cimbalom and double bass. The Ukrainian soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko masters the entire breadth of expressive variability necessary for these works, from the muted to the eruptive tone.

(Uwe Krusch, www.pizzicato.lu)