Friday 19 February 2016
For György Kurtág's 90th Birthday: Petite musique solennelle en hommage à Pierre Boulez 90
Premiered last year at Lucerne, this short piece, as stark, as clear, as concise, as monumental, as anything I know from its composer was intended, as its title makes clear, as a homage to the composer whose death remains and will remain the greatest of our musical losses in 2016. Webern stands, if anything, more closely and yet also more ambiguously behind the honour than the honoured. The post-war generation's work is far from done.