The Arches, Glasgow
After more than an hour of tormented aphorisms comes the singer's doleful surrender: "I can't actually tell a story – in fact, I am almost unable to speak." She collapses into wordless song and finally fades into her accompaniment. Kurtág's epic song-cycle Kafka Fragmente sets snippets of Kafka's diary to music; the entries flit through murky outcrops of the psyche, dealing in particular with stunted expression. Its unrelenting emotional impact and sonic variation is immense, but its constituent parts are tiny: 40 movements, some lasting only seconds, delivered by just one soprano and one violinist.
The volatile clusters of music need no visual aid to make them dramatic. Still, this is fiercely visceral stuff, and a degree of physical response seems natural. Peter Sellars directed a version at the Barbican last year that portrayed an American housewife giving voice to her stream of consciousness. For the Hebrides, René Zisterer has created something starker, a chilling void around which the musicians wander with no hope of home comforts.
Soprano Elizabeth Watts gave a formidable performance of unwavering control and directness. Violinist Alexander Janiczek matched with raw, impulsive and extraordinarily dexterous handling of the fiendishly skittish writing. Between them, it is a profound and powerful achievement.
It also proved the Arches, the brick-walled caverns under Glasgow's Central Station, a fabulous venue for chamber music. Trains passing overhead added fitting sound effects to Janác˘ek's Kreutzer Sonata, performed in slightly anaemic arrangement for piano trio, while transcribing a song from Schumann's Op 39 Liederkreis for cello and piano seemed to labour the "expressive limits" programmatic thread. Kafka Fragmente speaks for itself, especially when given such a fine voice.