Banse – Husmann – Keller – Groot

With their encyclopaedic diversity of compositional tools and the worldview outlined by the selected literary source material, the Kafka Fragments burst onto the scene in the mid-1980s as a summary of Kurtág's oeuvre, and their special status was already recognised by Kurtág's reception at the time of their premiere. Musicologist Hartmut Lück put it this way: Kurtág “collects sentences and aphorisms from Kafka’s diaries and letters: almost without exception, situations and images in which man strives to understand the events surrounding him – without ever reaching understanding.” In recent decades, a whole series of outstanding singers and violinists have undertaken performances of Kafka-Fragmente, and several studio recordings of the piece have been made. Juliane Banse and András Keller recorded it in 2006, and in the same year it won the Charles Cros Prize awarded by French music critics. The first half of the concert will feature a new, revised version of the Lichtenberg Songs, composed in the mid-1990s for double bass and soprano, performed by Maria Husmann and Niek de Groot. The concert series celebrating György Kurtág's 100th birthday will thus conclude with a joint concert by Maria Husmann and András Keller, who premiered Kurtág's new opera ten days earlier.