Játékok is a joyously sprawling collection of tiny piano pieces that György Kurtág has been writing since the 1970s. The music darts in all directions, blithely unpindownable, and many of the pieces last for just a few seconds. Hearing several together makes for a kaleidoscopic world of wit and rich imagination; Kurtág performs the duets with his wife, Márta, and they’re full of fond jokes and criss-crossing lines.
This recording of the collection’s duets is hard to fault in terms of technique and execution, but pianists Helen Bugallo and Amy Williams miss a trick by taking the music so unremittingly seriously. The earnest approach works for contemplative numbers like the Kyrie and Sarabande from Book IV, or the mournful In Memoriam Sebok Gyorgy from Book VIII, but elsewhere there could be bags more fun and feistiness: Játékok is the Hungarian word for games.
Bugallo and Williams are more at home in Kurtág’s wonderful duet transcriptions of early music: Machaut, Fescobaldi, Schutz, Purcell and Bach, taken to some stark and beautiful places.
