â¦Quasi una fantasia - Instrumental music with recorders between 1300 and 1650

This programme takes the listener on an adventurous journey through the musical mind of György Kurtág. His Játékok is a growing collection of compositions and textfragments. It is centered around the joy of playing and of movement in a very serious way. Kurtág writes: 'Let us use all our knowledge and all our memories of...everything that improvised music has ever created'. But it is Kurtág's transcriptions of works by Johann Sebastian Bach that form the cornerstones of this recording and teach us to listen to these masterpieces with new ears. At the heart of the programme we hear Schubert's renowned Fantasie, probing the borders of sonata form with the irrefutable logic of a sleepwalker in a feverish stream of music. Like Schubert, Kurtág is one of the few composers who possesses the secret of the music innate in words. Farewells, suffering and death all play a central role in Kurtág's work. He describes his work as a 'continuing quest', which is reflected in the remarkable combination of works on this recording. It can be listened to as a daring and loving struggle with time a description also applicable to Kurtág's work.

Inge Spinette and Jan Michiels have been playing piano duets since 1988 and have gradually built up a repertoire ranging from Mozart's sonatas to the latest contemporary works: from four-handed performances on the Tangentenflügel to two electronically transformed pianos in Stockhausen's Mantra. Between those two extremes there are so many gems for a 'miniature orchestra' of four hands on one or two keyboards. György and Márta Kurtág were very delighted by their playing during a workshop in the Orpheusinstituut (Ghent). They have recorded works by Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Bartók (the Sonata for two pianos and percussion with Gert François and Bart Quartier), Goeyvaerts and Kurtág. A piano duo as a bridge between very divergent styles.