Recent months’ releases include selections of solo and chamber works by Ferenc Farkas and his former student, György Kurtág, published by UMP Editio Musica Budapest, performed by excellent musicians.

"The third master" - his faithful monographer, János Kárpáti used this epithet on András Szőllősy who was born on February 27, 1921, a hundred years ago. He was the third beside György Ligeti and György Kurtág, who were all born in Transylvania in the 1920s, and then graduated from the Budapest Academy of Music - that is, he was the third behind his world-famous colleagues and friends.

Szőllősy’s oeuvre is thin, consisting of barely thirty compositions, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a few “autumn flowers” until 2002. The late start of the career is explained by the fact that although Szőllősy studied composition as a student of Zoltán Kodály, he felt more like a musicologist until the mid-1960s, collecting and editing the works and writings of his great predecessors, Béla Kodály and Bartók. (his Sz-numbers are still used to identify Bartók's works).

UMP Editio Musica Budapest is constantly striving to ensure that its partners have access to its products in a way and at a standard that meets the requirements of the 21st century. As part of this, the publisher will radically transform its website, catalogue and the range of its scores published in digitized form in 2020–2021.

As the first step in this process, from December 2020 on, UMP EMB scores will appear on nkoda.com, the world’s greatest digital library of sheet music. Here they can be studied, and - with the exception of works distributed as rental material - they can even be performed in public. By subscribing the nkoda app, you can now access the works of György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös, Zoltán Kodály and many other Hungarian composers, which you could only get to know from printed sheet music so far.

EMB publications are available here.

Bach’s The Art of Fugue has excited the general public and composers with its perfection and fragmentation for more than two hundred years. Now the Danubia Orchestra Óbuda has commissioned three Hungarian composers to express with their music what this masterpiece says to them today.

The 12 movements written by the three composers will be premiered in a kaleidoscopic arrangement, like a whole-evening collective composition, on November 20 at the Academy of Music, Budapest under the direction of Benjamin Bayl.

UPDATE: Due to the epidemic situation, the premiere has been postponed to 2021.

György Kurtág’s opera Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie comes to stage in Les Arts of Valencia on October 28. „The last masterpiece of the 20th century”, as Alex Ross labelled this masterpiece, had its premiere in La Scala in November 2018, and then the production came some months later to Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam. After in 2020 two further performances (in Budapest and in London on BBC Proms) had to be postponed due to the COVID pandemic, the Spanish premier is the third station of the tour of the original cast: Frode Olsen (Hamm) Leigh Melrose (Clov), Hilary Summers (Nell), Leonardo Cortellazzi (Nagg), the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana is directed by Markus Stenz, stage direction by Pierre Audi. Further performances are expected on June 10, 2021, with the New York Philharmonic and on June 24, 2021, in Theater Dortmund.

His career, musician habitude, wide range of interest were basically determined by his birth in Sopron, and that he was raised at the Hungarian/Austrian region. The centuries of the historical and cultural past of Sopron and its musical life preserving valuable traditions were ideal ground for the versatile talent, moving towards the artistic profession. He was known as an exceptional organist and piano accompanist although his real dedication predestined him for composition, therefore, he pursued that major with the guidance of János Viski at the Academy of Music. His talent for pedagogy became apparent already at that time and he started his career as a teacher of the Béla Bartók Secondary School of Music in 1957. Later he continued his educational work at the Academy of Music as an appointed professor at a fairly young age of 44 years. He taught composition primarily and almost all the theoretical subjects besides that – music theory, solfége, counterpoint, methodology of music theory, score-reading. He was the rector of the Academy between 1988 and 1994.

Los Angeles, September 14, 2020 — G. Ricordi & Co., New York, a Universal Music Publishing Classical company, today announced an exclusive global publishing agreement with innovative American composers and Bang on a Can co-founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. Under the new agreement, Gordon, Lang and Wolfe’s esteemed catalogs are now represented worldwide by Ricordi and its international partners.

This signing is the first for G. Ricordi & Co., New York, the newest member of Universal Music Publishing Group’s classical publishing operation and the first one in North America, joining its offices in Milan, Paris, Berlin, London and Budapest.

Kurtág’s work for piano and instrumental groups …quasi una fantasia… was performed at the BBC Proms on 30 August at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The soloist was Dame Mitsuko Uchida, and the London Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Sir Simon Rattle at an event held to the exclusion of the audience, which could be followed solely on radio and television.

"I wanted the musicians to not be able to discuss how bad the music was during rehearsals," said György Kurtág at his own expense in reference to this work, which calls for the use of orchestra scattered throughout the concert hall sounding from different directions and heights, which prophetically predicted today's expectations of social distance.

The new volume of Signs, Games and Messages by György Kurtág differs in some respect from the previous ones: It contains not only single solo and chamber music pieces for flute but also a substantial cycle that has remained hidden from the public for nearly twenty years: Scenes for solo flute, written in September 1997 and dedicated to Ádám Szokolay, which had its premiere in 2016 on the composer's 90th birthday. Each movement in the cycle reformulates familiar gestures of Kurtág's music: it develops pensive, impetuous, ethereal or playful characters.

One of the jewels of the volume belongs to Kurtág’s preparations of his opera, Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie: Clov’s farewell song with the accompaniment of a single bass flute.