György Kurtág (born 1926) - Scenes from a Novel, Op.19

Credits

Psappha Ensemble

Scenes from A Novel, op.19

When Kurtág was around 50 he took an intense interest in the poetry of Rimma Dalos, a Russian living in Budapest who shared his own sense of the fullness of the fragment. The two big works he based on her poems - Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova (1976-80) and Scenes from a Novel (1979-82) - are both song cycles whose individual numbers appear as splinters from some disaster of love and loss. Gestures are all the more intense for the lack of context and consequence. Dalos's words, taken from the page into the voice of a soprano, become those of a dramatic protagonist. Scenes from a novel are made into scenes from an opera.

The singer is accompanied by a tangy ensemble of violin, cimbalom (the Hungarian hammered dulcimer, which has featured often in Kurtág's instrumentation) and double bass. Not all used in every number, these instruments have multiple functions, setting the atmosphere, extending the singer's passionate expressions into wordless domains, seeming to interrogate the singer, or to ignore her. Musical forms and styles, too - rondo, waltz, ostinato - are never innocent but participate in the drama. However complex and various the means, though, Kurtág strikes through them with a naked directness.

Paul Griffiths © 2008