Meltzer Archive

KURTAG: Kafka Fragmente – Caroline Melzer, sop./Nurit Stark, v. – BIS

by Audiophile Audition | Mar 4, 2016 | SACD & Other Hi-Res Reviews

KURTAG: Kafka Fragmente – Caroline Melzer, sop./Nurit Stark, v. – BIS-2175, 58:08 multichannel SACD (Dist. by Naxos) *****:  Challenging these pieces may be, but if you buy this SACD, it will give you gooseflesh if you listen closely. Those famous works by Franz Kafka that you read in school? Not his best. The Trial, that novel about the nameless bureaucratic murder of an ordinary citizen has its moments, but overall I find the writing thuddingly prosaic. “Metamorphosis,” the short story about an ordinary citizen symbolically turned into a giant cockroach, shows better craft but belabors its central point. (It’s better as an animated cartoon.) And don’t get me started on The Castle and America, works so leaden and desultory I couldn’t get through them. No, the best of Kafka’s work is short. Very short. It’s found only in his fragments. The joining of modernist composer György Kurtág’s music to Franz Kafka’s letters and diary excerpts (the closest he came to poetry) is a fortuitous one for the late twentieth century. Here’s how it was done: “There is a destination, but no path to it; what we call a path is hesitation.” In Kurtág’s music, soprano Caroline Melzer holds one long […]