Ever claustrophobic, Kafka could not stomach big words. "If uttered by a young woman, breathlessly," the marvelous Italian writer Roberto Calasso notes in his magisterial recent study of the writer, "he had the impression that they emerged 'like fat mice from her little mouth.' "
That image alone should be enough to scare composers away from setting Kafka texts, what with music's fondness for fattening every syllable. And how many young sopranos are willing to accept rotund rodents as a side effect of song?
No Kafka-inspired opera has stuck. It might be tempting to argue that Kafka simply does not call for music, were Gyorgy Kurtag's "Kafka Fragments" for the unusual combination of soprano and solo violin not a masterpiece. Introducing a performance of the hourlong cycle at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon, violinist Movses Pogossian aptly noted the difficulty in discovering just where the Czech writer ends and the Hungarian composer begins.
Written in 1986, "Kafka Fragments" was immediately recognized as something special. But so demanding on performers and so draining on listeners is this cycle of 40 short musical incidents (ranging from around 15 seconds to 7 minutes) that it was rarely encountered until recently.
Two years ago, Peter Sellars staged it for soprano Dawn Upshaw and violinist Geoff Nuttall as the devastating psychosexual inner life of a wife cleaning house, watching Iraq disintegrate on television and falling apart. Last year, in honor of Kurtag's 80th birthday, ECM released a new recording by Juliane Banse and Andras Keller of the "Fragments" as intensely focused understated drama.
Pogossian, an Armenian violinist, and a young American soprano, Tony Arnold, are now touring the "Fragments" in preparation for another new recording on Bridge Records. Their powerful performance Sunday was part of Dilijan, a chamber music series for which Pogossian is artistic director.
Dilijan, named for a resort town in Armenia, has the mission of furthering Armenian music, and Pogossian began the program with three short works connected in one way or another to Armenia. All three were also meant to further the soprano/violin duo repertory, of which there isn't much.
