Switzerland - United States

The music of other composers—echoes of folk traditions, jazz, and popular music—flows through the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo’s concert. This program offers an encounter between two unique creative worlds: those of composers Conlon Nancarrow and György Kurtág.

In the late 1940s, Nancarrow found in the player piano a space of absolute freedom where he took rhythmic experimentation into uncharted territory. From that impulse, nearly fifty études were born. The duo of Amy Williams and Helena Bugallo presents, in this edition of the Cervantino Festival, four-hand transcriptions of nine of these pieces, ranging from the energy of boogie-woogie to the intricate architecture of their multi-tempo studies.

The pieces will engage in dialogue with selections from the Játékok (Games) cycle, which Kurtág began in the 1970s and which was originally conceived as an educational series for piano. Thus, the concert alternates between the voices of both composers, inviting the audience to discover unexpected resonances between their musical languages.

Added to this framework are two new Microludes for György Kurtág, written by Caspar Johannes Walter and Amy Williams as part of a series of four-hand pieces inspired by the spirit of Játékok.