“Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments is one of the composer’s longest works, running almost 55 minutes in the new recording by Susan Narucki and Curtis Macomber. But it is very much true to Kurtág’s compositional minimalism and his longstanding debt to Webern: the majority of its 40 elements last a minute or less. Completed in 1986, Kafka Fragments also shows strong evidence of Kurtág’s ongoing devotion to the avant-garde in Western music and to incorporating, within an ultra-modern idiom, references to Bach, Schumann and other composers whose music communicates very, very differently. Furthermore, Kafka Fragments stands as a kind of multimedia event, as if its musical elements are not in themselves sufficient to put across Kurtág’s concept: the score contains specific instructions for visual things the musicians are supposed to do during the performance – the violinist moving between two separate music stands, for instance. And what does all this specificity actually say, or what is it supposed to say, to an audience? Kurtág never really makes that clear: Kafka Fragments is not a literary compilation but an assemblage of texts from Franz Kafka’s diaries, letters and notebooks. The whole work is divided into four parts, although Part II contains only one setting, Der wahre Weg (“the true path”), which is the longest piece within the assemblage. Kurtág studiously avoided creating or imposing any sort of narrative overview on the pieces, and indeed rearranged them after initially composing the work – apparently deciding that the initial musical (and not literary) expression of Kafka Fragments would be better served by presenting the pieces in a changed order. Certainly the sequence is not random – not to the composer, anyway – but because the individual items are thoroughly disconnected from each other and from the whole, stylistically and expressively, there is a feeling of randomness about the entire thing. What can performers do with this song cycle that is also a voice/violin duet with theatrical elements and overtones? Narucki and Macomber handle Kafka Fragments as just that – fragments – making no attempt to interconnect the pieces and allowing each to produce its own unique sound world (often one that lasts a very brief moment indeed before flickering, or sometimes bursting, into silence). Macomber’s participatory intensity is notable in making this performance a true partnership, as is evident from the very start, with the violin’s back-and-forth rocking in the first fragment followed by its screechy skittering and top-of-range penetrating sound in the second. Narucki handles the vocal demands of the music very skillfully, nicely contrasting the pieces built on overtly trivial observations with those of an existential bent, having no apparent difficulty with the occasional folksong-like elements or the more-frequent leaps, yelps and Sprechstimme. Ultimately, Kafka Fragments is a study in extremes both of music and of meaning, with brief periods of ethereality contrasted with equally brief ones of dramatic emphasis. It is actually a work that is amenable to a great variety of successful interpretations whose effect depends on the singer’s vocal flexibility and tonal richness, and on the violinist’s emotive intensity and willingness to stride into the foreground at some times while subsiding into more-traditional accompaniment at others. Listeners enamored of modern vocal music delivered with uncompromising intensity will be as strongly drawn to this reading of Kafka Fragments as those with other predilections will be repelled by it.”