Pierre-Laurent Aimard recently visited Kurtág in Budapest to prepare a recording project of Kurtág’s piano music under the composer’s supervision. On this occasion, he was interviewed about his long-term relationship with Kurtág and the current project.

You have been playing Kurtág’s music for more than four decades. When and how did you first encounter this music?

As I recall it was Christmas 1978. I came to Budapest with my Hungarian friends who took me to Kurtág. We visited him one evening, and after he and I hadn’t exchanged a word for about forty minutes, while Márta, his wife, was talking with my friends, to resolve this awkward situation he very kindly invited me to the piano to play together pieces from his Játékok (Games). Thus, my first encounter with him was sharing music, sharing the piano, and sharing Játékok.

And you immediately understood each other…

What happened, is something indescribable. For me, that meant finding a lighthouse that illuminates your entire life. This was clear from the first moment.

You were associated with several contemporary composers, such as Messiaen, Ligeti and others. What made you stick with Kurtág for so long?

There are two dimensions: Kurtág, the composer, and Kurtág, the musician that cannot be separated. I have always felt that he embodies the essence of music, he is the one who always strives for the essence of music and brought music to the status it should occupy: not entertainment, not culture or profession but an essential dimension in life. What attracted me to this music, what made it increasingly indispensable to me, was that it represented a mixture of intimacy and universal meaning. I love certain phenomena of Asian, especially Japanese, art, and what I find captivating in them, is the combination of intensity and reduction, which can also be recognized in Kurtág’s music.

Now, you are working on recording selected pieces from Játékok. What is your goal with this recording? What do you want to convey to the audience with your selection?

I am convinced that the foremost role of an interpreter is to be a witness to the creators. The fact that many “interpreters” of our time endlessly repeat the same bestsellers of the past is, in my opinion, the decadence of this function. Instead, interpreters must act as mediators between creators and society. We must absorb all the layers that constitute a work of art in order to transmit them to other people and to later generations. As a teacher, it is a great responsibility for me to convey the right information to my students. So, my goal is to receive and absorb as much information as possible from Kurtág, and to preserve it in my playing as faithfully as I can. I have done this with other composers as well, but I think it is particularly important in the case of Kurtág, where the scores depend even more on oral tradition than with other composers. And I must add that Kurtág himself is an extraordinary pianist and interpreter of his own piano music. That’s why I initially wanted to record all his piano music under his control just like I did earlier with György Ligeti. Later, however, I decided that a selection of the best pieces could adequately represent this huge legacy, and I am glad that Kurtág approved my selection. In the first sessions, we are working together on the latest pieces from the last two decades, and later we will cover all the previous periods as well.