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Marino Formenti performs Kurtág's Ghosts.

At his concert at the Alexander Kasser Theater this Saturday, October 3, pianist Marino Formenti will introduce much of the audience to the music of György Kurtág.  And he’ll draw generous connections between the contemporary Hungarian composer and much of classical music history.  By programming Kurtág’s pieces—densely resonant, often brief in an extreme—with works from the modernist Messiaen, Beethoven, and the Baroque, Formenti delves with passionate, commanding appreciation into Kurtág’s own rich cultural concerns. 

A special figure among the late twentieth century’s powerful composers, Kurtág was raised in the part of Europe most savaged by war yet capable of the finest musical artistry.  Although his reticence in public is renowned, he’s drawn devotion from other superb musicians: On withdrawing from a piano recital at Carnegie Hall in 2000, his replacements included violist Kim Kashkashian, clarinetist Charles Neidich, and soprano Susan Narucki, who sang his Kafka Fragments (which Dawn Upshaw also performs). 

One admirer of Kurtág’s music, and of Formenti’s program, is Paul Hostetter, director of orchestral studies at MSU’s Cali School of Music.  On the phone, Hostetter called the solo piano pieces “technically challenging while being feasible and emotional.  Kurtág’s voice is organic, based in the natural law of sound.”  He said that Formenti has worked with the composer, learning which earlier masters inspire and move him.  Formenti then plunged into those artistic ramifications.  “There’s a Scarlatti sonata in the middle of the program,” Hostetter said, “and Marino’s probably read five hundred Scarlatti sonatas to choose the right one, rhythmically, melodically, formally.” Read more »