György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments, Op. 24, have been recorded by various soprano-and-violin pairs. The work poses challenges for both participants, from extended violin techniques to Sprechstimme, large leaps, and yelping in the vocal part. Yet it is perhaps the shifting relationships between the singer and the violin, with the violin part containing elements of both accompaniment and dialogue, that is the greatest trick. Soprano Susan Narucki and violinist Curtis Macomber have performed the work together for some time, and they are quite sensitive to the roles played by the two parts. As the title suggests, the work consists of settings of brief texts from Kafka’s letters and other incidental texts. Some are less than 15 seconds long, and there is a mysterious…
Tag Archive: György Kurtág
György Kurtág’s Játékok, whose title means “games,” are meant to depict the experiments of a child newly exposed to the piano; their structures take off from simple figures in the manner of Debussy’s etudes and range into the unexpected. The series began in the late ’70s and has continued into the 2020s, with Kurtág in his nineties; he supervised this 2025 recording by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. The pieces have the same basic nature but have expanded somewhat in scope; the earlier ones are mostly less than a minute long. They have been compared to Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, but in addition to the games aspect, the Játékok are mostly autobiographical works, and the ways in which Kurtág combines these two functions are endlessly interesting.