Sayings and Cracks – Tribute to György Kurtág Contemporary Music Days

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

A soprano sings a handful of notes and stops. The piano answers, and then there is silence — and then the next of twenty-four sections begins. György Kurtág composed "The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza" between 1963 and 1968 in fragments so compressed that the ear registers a phrase's shape only once it has already gone, and the pauses between them carry as much weight as the notes do.

That score is the spine of "Sayings and Cracks", the Kurtág tribute the Greek National Opera's Alternative Stage presents on 29 October 2026 at the SNFCC (ΚΠΙΣΝ). Op. 7 sets sermon texts by the sixteenth-century Hungarian preacher Péter Bornemisza across four cycles — Confession, Sin, Death, Spring — and it is one of the landmark scores of post-war Hungarian music, notoriously exposed for both players: two performers, no ensemble to hide inside.

Those two are soprano Fani Antonelou and pianist Giorgos Konstantinou. Antonelou studied opera, lied and early music in Stuttgart and Trossingen, took the Grand Prix at the 2005 Maria Callas competition in Athens in the oratorio and lied category, and won the Mendelssohn award in Frankfurt in both 2008 and 2009. Contemporary repertoire is where she has spent much of her career rather than a detour from it.

The evening does not stop at repertory. Stylianos Dimos has written "In the Cracks of Bornemisza" on commission from the Alternative Stage, and it receives its world premiere here: nine miniatures that alternate acoustic writing with mixed electroacoustic writing and answer Kurtág's fragments directly, filling the gaps he left open.

The crowd is people who came to listen rather than to be entertained — composition students, new-music regulars, singers who know how hard Op. 7 is to hold together. The setting is the Alternative Stage's black box, whose telescopic seating is rebuilt for each production, so there is no habitual good seat to book from memory; arrive without a plan for where you sit. The sound is unamplified, close, and full of deliberate silence. The door opens on a 20:30 curtain, with tickets at 12 EUR and 15 EUR and a 10 EUR concession, on sale from 31 July.

Placement matters here too. "Sayings and Cracks" is one of eighteen concerts in the Alternative Stage's Contemporary Music Days, running 25 October to 14 November 2026 under artistic director Giannis Angelakis, a cycle that also honours Georges Aperghis at 80 and Ligeti twenty years after his death, and closes the Kurtág thread with the Re:Trace Kurtág composition competition, whose award concert falls on 1 November.

If you want melody you can carry out of the building and hum on the tram home, Kurtág will not supply it — Op. 7 rewards attention paid second by second and punishes drifting. But if you want to hear two musicians work without a net on a score most Athens seasons never programme, this is the night to take.

Reach the SNFCC by tram, by bus, or on the free shuttle from central Athens; there is no metro to the door, so build in the extra fifteen minutes rather than discovering it at 20:20.

Kurtág turned 100 in February 2026, and the Alternative Stage marks the anniversary not with a garland but with a new Greek score written into the cracks of his own.