Márta Kurtág dies

Márta Kurtág graduated as a pianist at the Liszt Ferenc College of Music in Budapest as a student of István Antal and Lajos Hernádi, with Leó Weiner and András Mihály as her teachers of chamber music. She privately studied harmonics, form analysis and composition at Pál Kadosa.

Between 1953 and 1963 she was a piano teacher at the Bartók Béla Secondary School of Music in Budapest, and from 1972 she worked as a tutor at the Liszt Ferenc College of Music Teacher Training Institute.

György Kurtág and Márta Kurtág (Photo: Judit Marjai)

For more than six decades she was the wife of György Kurtág and an authoritative interpreter of his works. They performed regularly together, and in addition to Kurtág's compositions, they also performed four-handed transcriptions of Bach's chorales. They performed at renowned festivals and concert venues such as the Palais Garnier (Festival d'Automne à Paris), the Piano aux Jacobins (Paris), the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume (Aix-en-Provence), the Jerusalem Music Center, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Library of Congress (Washington), the Carnegie Hall (New York), the Tonhalle (Zurich), the Mozart Week (Salzburg) or the Vienna Festival.

Her piano playing was recorded by ECM, Col Legno and BMC. In 2009, she recorded Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, and the album was released by BMC Records.

In 2017, she and her husband were awarded the Franco Buitoni Special Award for their outstanding contribution to the world of music and for their long and devoted collaboration in music. “György Kurtág is an outstanding composer, but he always had Márta, the wonderful pianist. They love music together” – said pianist Uchida Mitsuko in his speech at the prize awarding ceremony.