KURTÁG Kafka Fragments • Juliane Banse (sop); András Keller (vn) • ECM 1965 (59:39 &)

The Kafka Fragments (1985–86) may be György Kurtág’s (b. 1926) masterpiece, albeit an unlikely one. This is a cycle made up of 40 epigrammatic texts from Kafka’s letters and journals, scored for soprano and violin. The whole thing lasts about an hour, and is intense and harrowing. But while deeply rooted in the tradition of Central European Expressionism, this is not a drab or abusive piece for the listener. Kurtág’s feat is to constantly reimagine each text, and discover yet another way to make it fresh, in short to endlessly invent. I’ve said this before, and in fact it reiterates the common wisdom, but it’s true: the Hungarian composer is perhaps the single greatest heir to Webern. But unlike the total serialists of the immediate postwar era, who concentrated on Webern’s rigorous control of the pitch-sets within a 12-tone row, Kurtág took his inspiration from the extraordinarily concise and luxuriant bagatelles of the composer’s atonal middle period. The challenge Kurtág has set himself in every work is to do only what’s necessary, but to realize it as fully as possible within a densely compressed framework. The music requires close listening, but it’s not exhausting, because the pieces’ miniature scale creates natural breaks from one to the next that make any single work of his “breathe.” A Kurtág piece is necessarily made up of many short movements, and this one is perhaps the highest expression of this practice.

This work is full of memorable moments: the incredibly pure upper violin tones of “The Flower hung dreamily”; the piercingly high vocal yelps of “Nothing of the kind”; the mutual arpeggiation of voice and violin in “The seamstresses”; the fluidly knotted double-stop writing for violin in “The true path.” And that’s just a sampling, almost random. Another listener would have his/her favorites, different from mine. At least three of the songs take on a more epic quality, even though the longest is only seven minutes—the aforementioned “The true path,” which is dedicated to Boulez and stands at the exact midpoint of the cycle; “Scene on a tram,” which is actually theatrical, in that the violinist must cross the stage to play a differently tuned instrument in its course; and the last, “The moonlit night dazzled us,” with its extended vocal melisma, inspired by the text’s image of crawling snakes. This being Kafka, some of the texts have a humor that may or may not be intentional—living in the era of Woody Allen, it’s hard not to yelp at such as “Once I broke my leg: it was the most wonderful experience of my life.” But Kurtág always succeeds in transcending the text without ever belittling or ignoring it.

This is a composer-supervised recording, and Keller was part of the original duo that premiered the work, so there’s a double connection right to the source in this CD. I have the Hungaroton premiere release (31135; with soprano Adrienne Csengery), and I still treasure it. The sound is a little more boomy—it was recorded in a church and has very ambient acoustics—and as a result the balance at times works a bit against the voice. Juliane Banse is an extraordinary singer, and it’s no criticism of Csengery, who herself does a magnificent job, to say Banse takes the lead by a hair. Her intonation is precise, her tone focused, and she has a rich velvety lower tone that makes her sound like a mezzo—except when she has to go into the stratosphere, where she sounds just as comfortable. There is one other recording of the work, on Ondine 868, with Sakari Omu and Anu Komsi, and I have not heard it. Readers with back issues (or with access to our new magazine online archive database) can look up Paul Rapoport’s review in 20:3; from his remarks, my suspicion remains that the ECM is the one to beat.

This release is timed to celebrate Kurtág’s 80th birthday, and it’s a fitting present. A profoundly modest man, he’s undoubtedly one of the great living master composers, and an artist with a devotion to his work and vision that’s unparalleled. If you happen to already have the Hungaroton recording, you don’t have to run out to get this one, but if you don’t know or have the piece on disc already, then this is a must.

FANFARE: Robert Carl