Johanna Vargas / Ilya Gringolts

• Classical Music

»Once I broke my leg, it was the best experience of my life« – such sentences that make you smile and are yet extremely serious are to be found in the heaps of diaries and letters left behind by Franz Kafka. The Hungarian composer György Kurtág set 40 of such fragments to music in 1985 for a cycle for soprano and violin – a really intimate line-up, which has found two acclaimed interpreters of contemporary music in Johanna Vargas and Ilya Gringolts in this concert.
»It is a fantastic economy: singing with a single violin and how this instrument is used technically and expressively,« this is how Kurtág’s friend and composer colleague György Ligeti once described it. Simply poignant to your ears, the »Kafka Fragments« are nevertheless a heavyweight of music’s modern age, an immense challenge to the musicians which demands everything of them – in expression, virtuosity and sensitivity.

PERFORMERS

Johanna Vargas soprano

Ilya Gringolts violin

PROGRAM

György Kurtág
Kafka Fragments for Soprano and Violin, Op. 24