The contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág is famous for writing very short, very sparse and VERY concentrated musical works. He has, however on occasional written more expansive pieces, including one big orchestral piece for the Berlin Philharmonic and some works for large chorus.

Obsessively self-critical, Kurtág disavowed most of the music he wrote before his mid-thirties, which included some for chorus, but a suggestion from the Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono that he write for chorus again resulted in a work that the BBC Singers premiered in London on today’s date in 1981.

It has an Italian title, “Omaggio a Luigi Nono,” or “Tribute to Luigi Nono,” ¬– a tip of the hat to his Italian colleague, but the work itself is a setting of bits of Russian poems. Now at the time of its premiere, 25 years after the Russian-led invasion of Hungary in 1956 and 10 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hungarian eyebrows were raised when Kurtág chose to set Russian texts. Disparaging or just plain “diss-ing” ANYTHING Russian was the normal M.O. for Hungarian intellectuals in those days.

Kurtág, for his part, stood his ground: as an ardent Dostoevsky’s fan, he simply said Russian was a sacred language to him.