Kafka Fragments
György Kurtág is the most fascinating of contemporary
composers. With his Kafka
Fragments (1987), the master of Webernesque brevity pulls splinters –
short paragraphs, sentences and, in one case, a single word – from the letters,
diaries and poems of Franz Kafka and sets them to a typically sparse and spiky
violin accompaniment.
American director Peter Sellars takes an equally
characteristic approach to staging the work, with soprano Dawn Upshaw acting
out a scenario of domestic angst as a (German-singing) US housewife doing her
daily chores.
The music serves Sellars’ purposes very well but the reverse isn’t always
true. At times Upshaw’s movements echo the sounds of Geoff
Nuttall’s
solo violin, turning Kurtág’s score into a soundtrack to a
wholly
invented theatrical context. While Kurtág
illuminates Sellars, the direction often literalises and diminishes the bald
abstraction of the composer’s intentions.
Sellars seizes on certain references to cleanliness peppered
through the texts (“Out of Kafka’s sense that he is always unclean comes this
idea of wanting and needing to cleanse’” he tells us in a programme note) and
domesticises them, so that we see Upshaw scrubbing, sweeping and rinsing away
the elliptical nature of the words and music.
Another layer is added with projections more readily
relevant to Sellars than Kafka/Kurtág but less intrusive and cheesy than those for
the director’s Tristan und Isolde, seen recently at the
Royal Festival Hall.
Singer and violinist perform well enough and the
interventions are not enough to distract completely from an enjoyable, and at
times moving, evening of music-making. We’ll have to wait until the New Year (when soprano Juliane
Banse is reunited with Andras Keller at the Wigmore Hall) to see how much more
effective Kurtág’s song cycle can be when performed with a greater focus on the
original work.
– Simon Thomas
