Quantcast

 

Kafka Fragments

Barbican Centre, West End
From: Thursday, 11th November 2010
To: Thursday, 11 November 2010

Our Review: starstarstar

Search for tickets


Use the link below to search for Kafka Fragments tickets on your desired date.

We're sorry, it seems that we do not currently sell tickets for this show. Please go directly to the box office.

Our Review: starstarstar

11 November 2010

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 abstr...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

No reviews yet

Click here to add your review

Creative

Peter Sellars (Director)
James F. Ingalls (Lighting)


Friends Email: Your Email: Comment: