Album: Gyorgy Kurtag, Signs, Games and Messages (Mode)

Composed and revised between the mid-1960s and now, György Kurtág's Signs, Games and Messages is a sequence of 24 fragmentary individual pieces for solo viola, realised en masse for the first time here by Maurizio Barbetti.

Some are little more than a few seconds long, others stretch to several minutes, a sometimes baffling succession of prickly pizzicato and cartoonish, sweeping glissandi, demented see-saw bowing and mouse-like scurryings. Many are musical aphorisms, prompts for reflection, and quite a few are evocations of friends and influential teachers, miniature memories like the lugubrious "Letter to Vera Ligeti" and "For Imre Földes at 60", which has the poise and immobility of a zen rock-garden.

DOWNLOAD THIS For Imre Földes at 60; Signs I; Perpetuum mobile a/b/c; Doloroso