György Kurtág: Kafka Fragments. Susan Narucki, soprano; Curtis Macomber, violin. AVIE. $19.99.
Barbara Harbach: Choral Music II—Advent and Christmas; Lent and Easter; The Reformation; Assorted Sacred Anthems; Secular Anthems; Spirituals. Apollo Voices of London conducted by Genevieve Ellis; Timothy End, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.
Except in the very broadest sense, music is not the universal language that it is so often said to be. Yes, certain sounds and rhythms, alone and in combination, produce certain physiological responses in humans – and in other primates, for that matter. But just how those responses are felt and interpreted, and just which sets of sounds and beats and harmonies lead to what sorts of feelings and reactions, is culturally (and perhaps physiologically) determined to so great a degree that music is far less universally communicative than, say, pain, which simply hurts. It is not even possible to see music as the opposite of pain, or one opposite, since different kinds of music produce very different types and levels of pleasure, and sometimes create no affect at all. Even within one small sliver of the musical world – say, classical music, broadly construed – the differences in type, form, and effectiveness of communication vary so broadly that imagining any sort of universality is naïve in the extreme.
Take this a step further: even contemporary classical music, which is a niche within a niche, and even vocal contemporary classical music, which nests even further within a kind of auditory matryoshka, communicates in so many different ways and to so many different effects that no glimmer of experiential universality remains. The result is that vocal performances and recordings are self-limited not so much by differences in spoken/sung language – although that is certainly one factor – as by the underlying limitations of musical communication through the specific forms and sounds chosen by different composers to express their ideas.
The contrast could scarcely be greater than in the case of new recordings of music by György Kurtág on the AVIE label and by Barbara Harbach on MSR Classics. Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments is one of the composer’s longest works, running almost 55 minutes in the new recording by Susan Narucki and Curtis Macomber. But it is very much true to Kurtág’s compositional minimalism and his longstanding debt to Webern: the majority of its 40 elements last a minute or less. Completed in 1986, Kafka Fragments also shows strong evidence of Kurtág’s ongoing devotion to the avant-garde in Western music and to incorporating, within an ultra-modern idiom, references to Bach, Schumann and other composers whose music communicates very, very differently. Furthermore, Kafka Fragments stands as a kind of multimedia event, as if its musical elements are not in themselves sufficient to put across Kurtág’s concept: the score contains specific instructions for visual things the musicians are supposed to do during the performance – the violinist moving between two separate music stands, for instance. And what does all this specificity actually say, or what is it supposed to say, to an audience? Kurtág never really makes that clear: Kafka Fragments is not a literary compilation but an assemblage of texts from Franz Kafka’s diaries, letters and notebooks. The whole work is divided into four parts, although Part II contains only one setting, Der wahre Weg (“the true path”), which is the longest piece within the assemblage. Kurtág studiously avoided creating or imposing any sort of narrative overview on the pieces, and indeed rearranged them after initially composing the work – apparently deciding that the initial musical (and not literary) expression of Kafka Fragments would be better served by presenting the pieces in a changed order. Certainly the sequence is not random – not to the composer, anyway – but because the individual items are thoroughly disconnected from each other and from the whole, stylistically and expressively, there is a feeling of randomness about the entire thing. What can performers do with this song cycle that is also a voice/violin duet with theatrical elements and overtones? Narucki and Macomber handle Kafka Fragments as just that – fragments – making no attempt to interconnect the pieces and allowing each to produce its own unique sound world (often one that lasts a very brief moment indeed before flickering, or sometimes bursting, into silence). Macomber’s participatory intensity is notable in making this performance a true partnership, as is evident from the very start, with the violin’s back-and-forth rocking in the first fragment followed by its screechy skittering and top-of-range penetrating sound in the second. Narucki handles the vocal demands of the music very skillfully, nicely contrasting the pieces built on overtly trivial observations with those of an existential bent, having no apparent difficulty with the occasional folksong-like elements or the more-frequent leaps, yelps and Sprechstimme. Ultimately, Kafka Fragments is a study in extremes both of music and of meaning, with brief periods of ethereality contrasted with equally brief ones of dramatic emphasis. It is actually a work that is amenable to a great variety of successful interpretations whose effect depends on the singer’s vocal flexibility and tonal richness, and on the violinist’s emotive intensity and willingness to stride into the foreground at some times while subsiding into more-traditional accompaniment at others. Listeners enamored of modern vocal music delivered with uncompromising intensity will be as strongly drawn to this reading of Kafka Fragments as those with other predilections will be repelled by it.
The elusive communicative power of Kurtág stands in strong contrast to the direct and much more audience-friendly approach of Barbara Harbach, whose work continues to appear on MSR Classics in a long-running series: this latest release is Volume 19. This is the second disc devoted to Harbach’s choral music and, like the first, features works collected under rather arbitrary content headings and given fine-grained and carefully balanced performances by Apollo Voices of London under Genevieve Ellis – with solid piano support from Timothy End. These works, all of them world première recordings, were composed over a span of more than four decades (1975-2017), but all share Harbach’s identifiable vocal style, which includes clarity of words (whose communication is foremost in all these pieces), a mixture of sweet and slightly acerbic harmonization, and a lack of interest in the sort of experimentation and expressive obfuscation in which a work such as Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments is steeped. The 25 pieces on this Harbach disc are almost all in the two-to-four-minute range, but seven of them are collected to particularly good effect in Luther Cantata (1991), the most-substantive piece on the CD and the only one in the section that is aptly called The Reformation. The effusive, proclamatory nature of some portions of this work contrasts to good effect with its sweeter elements and its more deeply emotional ones – notably From Deepest Depths I Cry to You, featuring solo male voice and a piano part that underlines the intimacy of the words. It is scarcely surprising that Luther Cantata both opens and closes with Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, but Harbach handles the famous hymn differently at the start and finish and uses it effectively to provide a sense of progress for the piece as a whole. Harbach’s determination to make even familiar texts newly expressive is especially apparent in the CD section called Assorted Sacred Anthems, which includes five psalm settings (from 1991, 2017 and, in three cases, 2002) – and in which the familiar Psalm 23 is set as The Lord Shepherds Me. The works presented under the section titles Advent and Christmas and Lent and Easter are comparatively straightforward, although pleasant enough. But the final two sections of the disc, including a total of four pieces under the titles Secular Anthems and Spirituals, take the CD as a whole in some new directions: here Harbach sets some traditional words and some by Helen Keller, Christina Rossetti and Jonathan Yordy, in all cases doing so with attentive focus on the meaning of the material and on disposing the chorus so as to maximize the impact of what is being sung. Harbach’s determination to move the audience in specific ways and specific emotional directions stands in stark contrast to Kurtág’s comparative lack of concern about audience perceptions and willingness to have each listener take something different from his Kafka settings. Together, Harbach and Kurtág demonstrate, without intending to do so, that music is best regarded not as a universal form of communication but as an infinitely malleable one that can be put to a myriad of uses for as many purposes as there are composers, performers and listeners.
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