CONTENT COURTESY FRAGMENTS
In a fragment — in the suddenness and the rough breaks — we may see more than in something whole and finished. Simply by separating the short texts here from their context, making them into fragments, Kurtág lets these extracts’ writings expand, so that a tiny anecdote, or even just a few words, can bulge with meaning. Aligning so many of them, he allows a whole view of life to emerge in shards and spaces. Then, in setting them to music, he makes them speak.
Kurtág is someone for whom the practice of an art is a way of being, demanding total devotion, sustained through periods when very little is achieved. There is no respite and no escape. A voice is speaking. What it says may be fable and paradox, but those are ways to the truth. Ask us questions about what we are, and where we think we are going. Invite us — forcibly, sinuously — to share dedication and honesty. These song cycles by Kurtág were written inside Hungary between 1969-1986 — the word “songs” does not seem right for these intense utterances — to words by leading Hungarian poets (József Attila, Dezső Tandori, Amy Károlyi).
Many of these fragmentary texts are compacted tales; they are like those bits of crumpled paper which, when dropped into water (the music), unfold into flowers.
One may note how often the imagery, in the music as in the text, is of journeying. The great song cycle of the early 19th Century was a travelogue: Schubert’s Winterreise. Here, from the late-20th Century, is a successor. The journey, though, is all within.
About Fragments
Fragments is an international collaboration of leading Australian and Hungarian artists designed to showcase the chamber music of the most influential Hungarian composers of the 20th and 21st centuries – Bartok, Ligeti, Kodály and Kurtág. Performances combine soprano, violin, cello and piano to showcase virtuosic works, Australian premieres, and new cutting-edge visual techniques designed to enhance the musical experience and accessibility to this rarely heard music.
Fragments (soprano Judit Molnar, violinist Graeme Jennings, visual artist Stephen Danzig, pianist Brierley Cutting) will perform at Ian Hanger Recital Hall on November 12 in Knots and Fields – The Voice of Kurtág.
