On 10 July 2026, the Giovanni Arvedi Auditorium at the Museo del Violino hosted the concluding concert of Kurtág 100, a project dedicated to the centenary of György Kurtág’s birth and developed through the longstanding collaboration between the Stauffer Academy and the Ensemble intercontemporain.
Four musicians from the French ensemble – Jeanne-Marie Conquer and Diego Tosi (violins), Odile Auboin (viola) and Renaud Déjardin (cello) – spent several days in Cremona working with Stauffer students on the programme before sharing the stage with them for the final concert. The residency also featured lectures by musicologist Philippe Albèra, one of the foremost scholars of contemporary music and the twentieth-century avant-garde.
Born in Hungary in 1926, György Kurtág is widely regarded as one of the most important living composers and one of the defining voices of post-war European music. His unmistakable musical language, often distilled into brief, intensely concentrated forms, has profoundly influenced generations of performers and composers alike. Every note seems to carry the weight of a memory, a dedication or a fleeting thought. His music brings together memory, emotional intensity and spiritual reflection in a poetic universe that continually oscillates between contemplation and restlessness, the earthly and the transcendent.
The programme brought together some of the most significant works from Kurtág’s catalogue, from the dazzling 12 Microludes for string quartet to Officium breve, his deeply personal homage to composer Endre Szervánszky, and selections from Signes, Jeux et Messages, the cycle of solo pieces that accompanied almost his entire creative life like a musical diary. Completing the programme was György Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1, Métamorphoses nocturnes, a work that illuminated the artistic and cultural landscape from which one of the most fertile periods of twentieth-century European music emerged.
Kurtág 100 continued the Stauffer Academy’s exploration of the leading figures of contemporary music in partnership with the Ensemble intercontemporain, following Boulez 100, the project presented in 2025 to mark the centenary of Pierre Boulez.
The concert also marked the conclusion of the 2025/2026 season of I Concerti della Stauffer, a journey that, concert after concert, reflected the essence of the Academy’s educational vision: making concert performance the natural culmination of artistic training while fostering a vibrant dialogue between professors, young musicians and audiences.
