One doesn't need to read the booklet with this CD to immediately identify Bartok as the influence, the spirit and the founder of C20th Hungarian music without who these pieces could never have been written.
Gyorgy Ligeti was surely the main inheritor of the tradition and in the light of Tasmin Little's assurance that his violin sonata is the most difficult thing in her repertoire, remains worthy of further study.
The added attraction of this state of the art recording, on top of the wonderful cover picture, is the esoteric appreciation of the more sonorous viola sound.
For a limited writer on music like me, each genre has a semantic field of words that can be of use in the attempt to describe it. It is a thankless task, of course, because any words are inadequate if one can simply listen to the music. But the thesaurus of relevant, viable words for this strain of modernism includes spare, austere, bleak, dark and, possibly, haunting. On this particular recording we can augment the list with virtuosic and just occasionally lyrical.
The Kurtag work is called Signs, Games and Messages, 19 short pieces so far, begun in 1989 and still 'in progress'. The longest is the first at 4 minutes 39 seconds and the shortest is 28 seconds. So we can also justifiably say 'fragmentary', too, which is the way of these things. Not inconclusive because they can be taken as a whole within which there are traces of distorted dance rhythms, glimpses of lyricism, demanding expectations of the soloist and, I'd say, an expression of resilience against the darkness. But we are probably not going to say this is like Boccherini or that is organized along obviously 'classical' lines.
Ligeti's Sonata is thus in comparison literally 'more of a piece'. It's not supposed to be easy but I think one might say, a bit like Mark Twain said that 'I'm told that Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds' that Ligeti isn't as difficult (to listen to) as it sounds. Even I realize that it must be difficult to play and Kim Kashkashian clearly knows her way around the viola.
I'm not going to be whistling any of the tunes from this disc on my way into work tomorrow. For one thing, I don't know if it has any tunes and, secondly, I can't whistle. And I'm not suggesting that I'll be playing this more often than I play Andreas Scholl's recording of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, which has been the disc at the top of my playlist over the last few months, with the Charpentier Lecons de Tenebres next. But once one has Tasmin's solo Bartok assimilated into one's musical wardrobe, then you might want something to wear with it and this might be a good candidate to be that thing.
I love things like this, somewhat hard to find and outside of the grim despair of what is offered as popular entertainment nowadays. It reminds me of when I was 13, listening to Sounds of the Seventies after 10 p.m. on Radio 1, in search of the least middle of the road music I could discover. This is my new equiivalent of that and without such things I'm not sure there would be any point in being interested in music at all.