Chekhov's Mistress
re Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments
Mark Swed wrote a great piece on György Kurtág for the L.A. Times. Regarding Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments, Swed writes:
There is, however, no less indifferent music in all of Hungary or anywhere else for that matter. Kurtág culled the text from Kafka’s diaries and letters to create a stumbling journey of the writer’s gaunt, haunted soul. The violin’s two notes represent “the march of the good.” The soprano, who sings brilliant rings around her unwavering accompaniment, offers the dance of “the others.” And the path followed for the next hour is “miserable life” enlivened: breath and suffocation, good and bad, heaven and hell, spirit and flesh, entwined.
I also recently mentioned Alex Ross’s glowing piece on Kurtág’s interpretation of a Bach piece.
I tell you, I’d love to hear some of this work performed. I have several Kurtág recordings that I was attracted to in part because of the literary emphasis, but they leave me wondering if that very literariness is not distracting and somehow I’ve not been able to wrap my brain around the beauty that Swed and Ross describe. But reading articles like Swed’s does make me want to give them another listen.
comments
No CommentsCreative Commons License Deed Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
You are free:
- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
-
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
-
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
- Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license):
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode
This site employs rank-denial and other anti-spam measures.
Your link here will do nothing for your rankings or traffic. Off-topic comments will be deleted.
Previous entry: Pynchon Against the Day
