29 JANUARY - 5 FEBRUARY 2009

György Kurtág
& Antoine Gindt

Kafka-Fragmente

THEATRE/music

In association with T&M - Paris

No performance on Monday 1 and Tuesday 2 February
Performance sung in German, with French subtitles. Duration : 1H00

Music György Kurtág (opus 24 for voice and violin, 1985-87) after Franz Kafka (extracts from Kafka's Journal and Letters) / Production director Antoine Gindt / Staging and lighting Klaus Grünberg / Costumes Gwendoline Bouget / Artistic collaboration Aurélia Guillet / With Salome Kammer (soprano), Carolin Widmann (violin), Jacques Albert (actor), Judith Morisseau (actor) and five performers.

György Kurtág's work for voice and violin is based on the private, secret journals and letters of Franz Kafka, in a spectacular staging by Antoine Gindt.

Based on shorts texts by Kafka, mostly from his journals and letters to Milena, György Kurtág creates an intimist, powerful, highly figurative score; sixty minutes of music for soprano and violin – unique in the history of music – comprising forty fragments, some just a few phrases long, others relating complete short stories, each one a microcosm in its own right.

Antoine Gindt's new staging of the work, which was initially conceived for concert performance, features an imaginary theatrical presentation of Kafka's dreamlike world. A theatre of inversion; an insistent examination of speech and delivery; a sophisticated, balanced, theatrical translation of the relationships imagined by the composer. The performers' ever-changing gestures and movements are dictated by the horrifying abysses opened up by Kafka's aphorisms: violinist Carolin Widmann and soprano Salome Kammer interpret Kurtág's opus 24 with astonishing intimacy and depth.

"No one sings with such purity as those who find themselves in the deepest reaches of Hell; it is their singing that we mistake for the song of angels." The powerful fragments, combined with the strangeness of the setting, decor and lighting, the use of video, the appearance and disappearance of the performers, the enchanting power of György Kurtág's music, make this a rare, unmissable art event.

György Kurtág is a Hungarian composer born in 1926. He studied piano and composition in Budapest, and was taught by Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen in Paris in the 1950s, after which he returned to Hungary (unlike his friend György Ligeti), where the bulk of his work was composed until the 1980s, when he rose to international prominence with the world première in Paris of his work Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova, by the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Performances at the Salzburg Festival, by the Berlin Philharmonic, at the Festival d’Automne à Paris, and the Vienna Konzerthaus followed, earning him a reputation as a pivotal composer of contemporary music.

He has won numerous awards, including the International Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.
György Kurtág lives in France.

Production T&M-Paris
Performances at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers with the support of the Réseau Varèse (European network for the creation and performance of contemporary music),  and the European Union Cultural Programme

Co-production Théâtre de Gennevilliers and T&M-Paris
Premiered in Orléans on Deceber 13, 2007