Notes from the 2026 Salzburg Festival ( 2 ) Kopatchinskaja, Friends, and György Kurtág

Salzburg Festival • Chamber Music • Hommage à Kurtág

Also published in Die Presse: Kopatchinskaja in Salzburg: Schnurren und Kratzen für Kurtág & Co.

Kurtág / Schumann Hommage à R. Sch et al Kashkashian, Levin, Brunner ECM, 2006 US | UK | DE

György Kurtág Játékok (selection) Gábor Csalog, M.& G. Kurtág BMC Records, 2006 US | UK | DE

Playing with Music

Music as lived joy: Kopatchinskaja brings Kurtág to Salzburg — and it's simply great entertainment

Patricia Kopatchinskaja was made for playing the music of György Kurtág — or vice versa. However that may be, in her chamber music homage to the hundred-year-old composer at the Salzburg Festival, she demonstrated how much is already won — not only in contemporary music — when a violinist refuses to insist on playing just beautifully, and instead interprets with the whole body, from the curls down to the tips of her toes.

Fiddling, stomping, plucking, she worked her way through Kurtág's profound scrawlings from „Zeichen, Spiele und Botschaften" and the „Játékok" collections with her musical partners. Pianist Olga Pashchenko had already impressed in the opening second Bartók Rhapsody for violin and piano — both in the restraint of her part, palying along as if parallel to the violin, and in the suddenness with which she lunged forward, like a hungry moray-eel, whenever Bartók thrusts the piano into the spotlight. In the Kurtág she drew out the abstract tenderness of „Hommage à Márta," just as Kopatchinskaja shaped „…féerie d'automne…" as a pianissimo exhalation — light as on butterfly-wings. Elsewhere Kopatchinskaja plunged into her instrument — alone or alongside Pashchenko, violinist Jonia Ilias Kadesha, the lusciously toned Lawrence Power on viola, and/or Sol Gabetta on cello — like a tomcat in a mating fight, driving it through Kurtág's fragile, skewed, compressed music. What strikes one above all is how unpretentiously modern Kurtág writes. What would sound simply absurd from other, self-important composers is here disarming.

Bartók's „Bagpipe" Duo from the „44 Duos" for two violins was staged as a small, spontaneous theatrical piece for all six musicians, with the musicians eventually exiting until only Reto Bieri (clarinet), Kopatchinskaja and Pashchenko remained for the wild „Contrasts" for violin, clarinet and piano — also Bartók — which, living up to its name, was carried forward wild and unleashed, then whispering and murmured.

Mozart's Clarinet Quintet K. 581 waited as a reward in the second half — though the audience was already so enthused by the Kurtág and Bartók that no lure would have been needed. Then again, one simply doesn't say no to a slow movement that sublime — and so they listened to the fiveseome, gathered around Bieri and his modern basset clarinet, in these four movements of pure pleasure: Sensitive, soft and supple, genuine ego-free chamber music atmosphere par excellance. Where Bieri had — deliberately — hissed and spat air in the excitable Bartók, here he was milk and honey manifest in the form of a clarinet, bewitchingly quiet and breathless in the slow movement. But „contrasts" was the watchword here too — the Quintet went off in the Menuetto as if stung by hornet: Kopatchinskaja does not let such opportunities pass to go for broke instead of playing nice. (That's rather Gabetta's game, although she went along with the general gist quite nicely here.) The Variations finale was handled with generous latitude — entirely in keeping with so playful an ensemble.

Jonian Ilias Kadesha, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Olga Pashchenko, Lawrence Power, Sol Gabetta. SF / Marco Borrelli

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