Music Reviews : Narucki, Malan Offer ‘Kafka Fragments’

We have come to the dark miniature fantasies of Gyorgy Kurtag relatively late in this part of the world. Local interest in the Romanian-Hungarian composer--much feted in Europe--has grown, however, since the 1986 Ojai Festival, when soprano Susan Narucki and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic introduced his “Messages of the Late R. V. Troussova.”

Narucki continues to be our principal source of Kurtag. She gave a dazzling account with his unaccompanied “Attila Jozsef Fragments”--which she studied with the composer--on a Green Umbrella program last November.

This week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she turned to the “Kafka Fragments,” the sole component of the penultimate Monday Evening Concert of the season. In intense, accomplished collaboration with violinist Roy Malan, Narucki made an abstracted monodrama of the 40 songs Kurtag created of bits culled from Kafka’s diaries and letters for a German radio commission.

As one might expect, this is not cheery or immediately pertinent stuff, and an even larger proportion of the listening public than usual stayed away. “Once I broke my leg, it was the most wonderful experience of my life,” the author and musicians tell us, something readily believable in context.

Even the lightest moments rise only to sardonic mania, with depression never far away. But though the text snippets run the emotional gamut from self-pity to self-contempt, the music is sharply reflective and tightly interlaced.

Kurtag’s style here is neo-expressionist angularity, often tinted by wryly observed parody. He stretches range and technique, asking for everything from hysteric shrieks to husky chants. He paints words with strokes both blatant and subtle, and demands alert, interactive ensemble precision on top of imagery and story-telling.

Though there is barely an hour of music involved, there is no place to coast, mentally or vocally. Narucki displayed ample stamina and concentration, her voice as fluently evocative in the final tremulous crawl through the dust as in the cynical simplicity of the opening march.

Malan shadowed her with aplomb and conviction, though the instrumental part often seems merely a clever contrivance against the Angst of the singer. He provided bravura elan where needed, and sure fingers everywhere.

The most extended pieces are the homage to Boulez, the lone song in Part II, and the Part IV finale, with its folkish energies dissipated in a cold, lyric night. The partnership of voice and violin is tightest there, and the music more concentrated on substance than image.

The performers took a short, probably necessary, intermission, but without aborting the real continuity between the four unbalanced sections. They supplied such keen virtuosity to their relentlessly down-beat task that the contrast generated its own idiosyncratic synergy.