« Shifting Back Ten Centuries?
Main
Our New Toy »
January 27, 2007
What Do You Get When You Mix Kafka and Kurtág?
Life: sometimes exhilarating, sometimes joyous, sometimes confusing, sometimes depressing, sometimes horrifying, often humorous
Last night Shirley and I went to hear Tony Arnold and Movses Pogossian perform György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments, Op. 24 (1986), for soprano and violin.
Normally we have quite mixed feeling when listening to "new" music but last night was an exception. This was an amazing performance of wonderful music of considerable technical difficulty.
Arnold, the soprano, has great range and control as she demonstrated throughout the near one hour of continuous song. Her enunciation is fabulous. The words are all in Kafka's German, but I had no trouble following them and keeping my place as the program advanced. But perhaps best of all, she didn't just sing her part, she performed it. Her body and particularly her eyes reinforced the music and the lyrics in a way that is not as common as I wish it were in formal concert settings.
Pogossian did amazing things with his violins: two of them with slightly different tonal characteristics but also different tuning. We have come to expect great violin performances at these concerts and this one was certainly no exception.
The evening started with an unusual but welcome introduction to the piece by the performers themselves. They took turns explaining the origins of the words themselves, Kafka's personal notebooks, and the music and arrangement of Kafka's words by Kurtág. They also shared their own feeling towards Kafka Fragments and time they spent discussing it with Kurtág. Their comments supplemented a very complete published program.
Kafka did not intend that these private reflects would be made public and Kurtág uses them out of context to tell his own story. Forty individual quotations, each providing the lyrics for individual musical movements each averaging a little less than two minutes in length, are distributed unevenly across four parts. Part I has 19 movements. Part II has one movement. Of the forty fragments, I think my favorite was in part III movement 5
Leoparden brechen in den Tempel ein und saufen die Opferkrüge leer: das wiederholt sich immer wieder: schließlich kann man es vorausberechnen, und es wird ein Teil der Zermonie.Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial jugs dry; this is repeated, over and over, until one can know in advance when they will come, and it becomes part of the ceremony.
A great evening! Be sure to catch it when it comes to your town or village.
Posted by Duane Smith at January 27, 2007 2:46 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2007
Comments
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.