Kurtág 80 - First Edition Budapest Music Center celebrated György Kurtág’s 80th birthday in February 2006 with a five-day series of concerts held in the Budapest Palace of Arts and the Music Academy. Important and rarely played Kurtág works were heard, including Hipartita and Zwiegespräch, then played for the first time in Hungary. A video and sound recording was made of the concert series, and these two CDs feature the pieces that have not yet been released on disc. BMC has made it possible for the post-production work following the concert in the studio to go further than making First Edition the customary concert documentation, and also beyond the dry sterility of regular studio recordings. The original concept, in which György Kurtág would have spoken about his works in the CD booklet, has unfortunately not come to be. An interview of several hours was made, but later Kurtág criticized his own words with the same exactingness, rigour, and even harshness, as he criticizes the sounds and phrases heard in rehearsals of his pieces. One could even say that he required of himself what he requires of musicians: to approach, with all its weight and lightness, the moment when sound is born. And, he felt, he had not come close enough to that moment. Our aim in the CD adaptation of the concert recording was not to make the listener believe he is present at the concert, but somehow through the sound also to convey the things he cannot see, because the gesture in Kurtág’s music is of vital importance. With him, if we cannot see the musician, everything changes, even the proportion of the notes. That is why we have tried to find how the missing sight can be substituted with, or rather translated into sound, in such a way that a new dramaturgy, and a new experience, be created. In order to achieve this, it seemed appropriate to place the musical material in a different sounding-space, as well as using the microphones as cameras, moving in closer on the musicians, and then backing away. György Kurtág jr. – artistic and musical director of the celebratory release