Louth Contemporary Music Society
PRESENTS ‘KAFKA FRAGMENTS’ by György Kurtág
Fri 21st Feb| 8.pm | Adm €10
Tickets available from www.centralticketbureau.com
or Ph: 0818 205 205
Claire Booth’s performance is a real tour de force. She has done nothing finer. The Guardian
Louth Contemporary Music Society presents the Irish Premiere of György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments. Hungarian contemporary composer György Kurtág drew inspiration from the diaries, letters and notebooks of Franz Kafka to create this powerful work.
Kafka Fragments, a work of sparse lyrical beauty, is performed by soprano Claire Booth and violinist Peter Manning in the unique setting of Dundalk Gaol. The Guardian described Booth and Manning’s performance in The Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre as “A real tour de force, mesmerising.”
Kafka Fragments is composed of 40 exquisitely crafted miniatures, scored for soprano and solo violin Kurtág lets these extracts from Kafka’s private 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. Each is a quick glance into the mirror that Kafka’s writing gave him, the mirror of an artist whose edges are his own: between irony and anxiety, between withdrawal and explosion, between creative potency and indecision.
This is a unique performance not to be missed.
Kafka Fragments is funded by the Arts Council and financially supported by Create Louth.