Víkingur Ólafsson Exchanges Bach for Kurtág

This Friday Deutsche Grammophon (DG) will release its latest album of recordings of Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. Some readers may recall that his last release came out in September of 2018 with the title Bach Reworks / Part 1. Those expecting that the new album will be Part 2 may be disappointed. The title of the new album is From Afar, and Ólafsson has shifted his attention from Johann Sebastian Bach to György Kurtág. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders of this new release.

I first encountered Kurtág’s music at a recital presented by San Francisco Performances back when my “profession” was information technology. The recitalist was pianist Marino Formenti, and the title of his program was Kurtág’s Ghosts. The selections were an extended collection of compositions taken from the ten volumes that Kurtág had entitled Játékok (games). The individual selections were miniature unto an extreme, often assigned titles that could be playful (as in games) or provocative, if not both.

The tracks on From Afar draw upon the first, third, and fifth of those ten volumes. They are interleaved with selections by Bach (often arranged for the keyboard), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, and Thomas Adès. There are also a few arrangements of Icelandic sources. Furthermore, in addition to surveying the Játékok repertoire, the album begins with Kurtág’s arrangement of Bach’s BWV 619, one of the chorale preludes collected in the Orgelbüchlein. Those readers that recall my thoughts about Bach Reworks may recall my conclusion that all of the tracks “seemed to have everything to do with the ego of the pianist and little to do with anyone else, not just Bach but also the transcribers.”

An intimate performance of a Bach transcription by Márta and György Kurtág (screen shot from a YouTube video)

While the advance material for From Afar claims that the album was “inspired by a life-changing meeting” with Kurtág, I have to say that I wonder what, specifically, inspired Ólafsson. I offer the album’s opening track as a case in point. Ólafsson’s performance of Kurtág’s Bach arrangement was labored and tedious unto an extreme. My immediate reaction was to ask myself whether this was Kurtág having his way with Bach, perhaps in some of the ways that Ólafsson did in Bach Reworks. Fortunately, I was able to find a YouTube video of Kurtág playing one of his Bach transcriptions, a four-hand version that he played with his wife Márta. To my surprise (and satisfaction), Kurtág’s arrangement was about as true to the source as one could expect; and the only playfulness in the performance had to do with the interleaving of the hands of husband and wife.

I also have to wonder if Kurtág had inspired Ólafsson to record all of his selections twice, first on a grand piano and then on an upright. This means that the album has two CDs, one for each of the instruments. (That’s the good news. Had the two performances been interleaved, the listening experience would probably have driven me crazy!) The track listing in the booklet provides a side-by-side account of the durations of each of the 22 tracks. This is clearly “useful data” for comparing the two performances, but I must confess that I was far more interested in comparing the printed durations than in getting my head around how they related to the individual track performances.