Music / Homage to Kurtag, Amy Moore soprano. Edward Neeman piano. At the Embassy of Hungary, February 15. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

The Embassy of Hungary provided a tall space full of wooden rafters that warmly supported an intriguing and thought-provoking concert by soprano Amy Moore with Edward Neeman at the piano. 

It was advertised by Art Song Canberra as a tribute to Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag who is just coming up to his 100th birthday on February 19. But the first half of the program was set up to remind the audience of the business of setting words to music. This made ready them for the second half, which was all Kurtag.

Moore has a rich warm voice and an easy good-humoured manner with the audience, introducing first three short and melancholy settings on love by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. Then came Robert Schumann’s Frauen – Liebe und Leben (Woman’s Love and Life).

Moore reminded us that there’s been a fair amount of criticism of the rather passive view this poem cycle takes of female existence. Hard to disagree but It’s still, of course, lovely to listen to and Moore handled it beautifully with Neeman in strong support.

After interval came the Kurtag pieces that presented a rather bleaker view of human existence and a tentative approach to love, complete with some old inscriptions that talk of jealousy and punishment and gravestones and dying young and being amazed that one must die. The much-deserved encore was a surprisingly cheerful piece about a necklace.

But it’s worth remembering that this is a composer who turned Samuel Beckett’s Endgame into an opera (Fin de Partie).

This was an enjoyable and knowledgeable celebration of Kurtag by Moore and Neeman with an examination of some of the influences that may have shaped what he produced.

Supported by copious program notes and translations this concert was given the appreciation it deserved by a quietly enthusiastic audience.