Kurtag’s Kafka fragments and Bach’s harpsichord works

The Ultrasound Festival with György Kurtág’s legendary “Kafka Fragments” runs until Sunday. In the Pierre Boulez Hall there are Bach’s harpsichord concerts and fairytale sounds from Schumann and Co.

The Konzerthaus Chamber Orchestra plays dark chamber music and the Brahms Ensemble of the Philharmonic juxtaposes the brawlers Brahms and Bruckner.

Things get symphonic with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, which brings us closer to music by two Bohemian composers, combined with Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony.

1 Brahms Ensemble Berlin

Numerous ensembles were founded from the ranks of the Philharmonic. So does the Brahms Ensemble. The orchestra’s connection to Johannes Brahms, who appeared with the Philharmonic several times, is traditionally close. The ensemble is dedicated to its chamber music, such as the String Quintet No. 2 in G major, Op. 111. He is said to have described the cheerful, melancholic work to Clara Schumann in 1890 as “not unfunny”.

Anton Bruckner’s Intermezzo and Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quintet No. 2 are juxtaposed. Exciting. For a long time, Brahms rejected Bruckner’s works as a “great fraud”. Rachel Schmidt (violin), Raimar Orlovsky (violin), Diyang Mei (viola), Julia Gartemann (viola) and Uladzimir Sinkevich (cello) play.

2 Kristian Bezuidenhout plays Bach’s harpsichord concertos

Johann Sebastian Bach was known to be a virtuoso organist. But he did not ignore the innovations of the time and began writing a whole cycle of harpsichord concertos in the 1730s. The harpsichord was considered an aristocratic instrument, but Bach may have owned one. Many of his works that are played on the piano today were composed on and for the harpsichord – such as the Goldberg Variations.

Bach took a very sustainable approach to his harpsichord concerts and also used earlier solo concerts, for example for the violin or oboe. Kristian Bezuidenhout, the South African pianist and specialist in historical performance practice, presents three of these works in a chamber music setting with strings.

The best-known and most virtuosic piece in the series is the Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings in D minor BWV 1052, which concludes the evening. All three movements come from earlier works. Bach played it for the first time in the Café Zimmermann in Leipzig. A harpsichord version of the well-known D minor Chaconne and the Toccata D minor BWV 913 can also be heard.

3 György Kurtág: Kafka-Fragmente

“The Metamorphosis”, “The Trial” – Franz Kafka’s work belongs to the canon of world literature. For his legendary “Kafka Fragments,” created in the mid-1980s, the composer György Kurtág spent years collecting lines and quotes from his private records, such as diaries, letters and notes, which he set to music.

The result is a cycle of 40 miniature dramas for soprano and violin, which develops its very own pull. The shortest is eleven seconds long: “Someone tugged on my dress, but I shook him off.” In the expressive cycle, Kurtág shows his art of condensing Kafka’s often absurd observations and enigmatic thoughts.

As part of the Ultraschall Festival and on the occasion of Kurtág’s 100th birthday in February, soprano Johanna Vargas sings, accompanied by Ilya Gringolts. The festival runs until Sunday.

4 Dark masterpieces by Schubert and Strauss

Franz Schubert was always concerned with transience. So he initially set Matthias Claudius’ poem Death and the Maiden to music as a song.

“Over! oh, over! / Go, wild bone man! / I’m still young, go, dear! / And don’t touch me,” it says. A string quartet in D minor followed later, in the second movement of which he took up the song. The Konzerthaus Chamber Orchestra plays Mahler’s arrangement for string orchestra under Sayako Kusaka.

Before that there is Richard Strauss’ Metamorphoses for 23 solo strings, which the then 80-year-old wrote in 1945 after the end of the war in view of the unspeakable destruction. He wrote “Mourning for Munich” about the first sketch in 1944.

5 Freiburg Baroque Orchestra

The Bohemian composer Leopold Koželuh (1747-1818) left behind around 400 works. He went from Prague to Vienna, also celebrated success as a pianist and was soon considered a competitor to Mozart. In 1792 he became chamber music director and court composer. After his death, however, his work was forgotten. The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra plays his Symphony in G minor Op. 22 No. 3.

Anton Kraft (1749-1820) also moved from Bohemia to Vienna. He was, among other things, a student and solo cellist with Haydn. The soloist of his cello concerto op. 4 C major is Nicolas Altstaedt.

The finale is Mozart’s dramatic Prague Symphony. He went the opposite way. His Symphony No. 38 in D major KV 504 celebrated its premiere in Prague in 1787.

6 Boulez Ensemble & Matthias Pintscher

Fairy tales have always played an important role in classical music. As the start of a three-part concert series with the Boulez Ensemble, Matthias Pintscher conducts Robert Schumann’s Fairy Tale Pictures for Piano and Viola op. 113, which opens the evening and can be interpreted as an attempt to capture the classic fairy tale tone in music.

Olga Neuwirth’s viola concerto “Remnants of songs … an Amphigory”, which also plays with romantic fairy-tale motifs such as wandering, searching and being lost, would have fit perfectly into this context. Instead, you can hear her no less fantastic trumpet concerto “…miramondo multiplo…”, which juggles with Handel quotes and sometimes seems to be reminiscent of jazz. As was the case at the premiere in 2006 under Pierre Boulez himself, the soloist part will be taken on by the Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger.

Hans Werner Henze, who was also involved in composing fairy tale images, concludes the work. His “Le Miracle de la rose” for ensemble and clarinet will be heard, played here by the Hungarian Boglárka Pecze. The piece is a fantasy about Jean Genet’s novel of the same name, which is characterized by the contradiction between the magic of love and beauty and the dark sides of existence – here in the form of crime and punishment – as we know it from many fairy tales.