Edition: U.S. / Global

Review/Music; Aphoristic Kafka, for Soprano and Violin

By ALLAN KOZINN, Special to the New York Times
Published: August 13, 1988

The entire Monday evening installment of the Contemporary Music Festival at Tanglewood was devoted to ''Kafka Fragments'' (Op. 24), a spare but often wrenching 75-minute duo for soprano and violin by the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag. Completed in 1986, the work is a collection of mostly aphoristic settings of excerpts from Franz Kafka's letters and diaries.

The texts - some running a few sentences, many merely a phrase -make up a stream of vivid fantasies tinged with raw emotion and punctuated by simple, almost platitudinous observations. And Mr. Kurtag's responses are direct, literal and often picturesque distillations of each fragment's essential spirit.

The score's inherent discontinuity, combined with its expressionist language and the forceful, insistent but circumscribed coloration of its violin and voice scoring, worked both for and against it, as did the composer's instruction that the set be played without an intermission. For some people in the audience, this combination of elements apparently added up to monotony, and a stream of impatient listeners fled the Theater-Concert Hall throughout the performance.

Those who stayed to hear out Mr. Kurtag's conception, though, heard a work that had its intensely moving moments as well as its trying ones and that ultimately proved quite compelling, at least in the dramatic rendering given it by the violinist Rolf Schulte and the soprano Adrienne Csengery.

Mr. Kurtag's idiom is basically atonal, but in the concise scope of these settings, he uses whatever elements he needs to make his (or Kafka's) point. His selection of texts allows for enormous variety, but even so, the settings show a remarkably fertile imagination. Often, there is a palpable tension between the violin and soprano lines.

For instance, in setting the fragment ''though the hounds are still in the courtyard, the game will not escape, no matter how they race through the woods,'' the composer gives the soprano an imperious yet dispassionately narrative line, while the violin part embodies dissonant allusions to hunting calls and frantic scampering and, most important, the terror of the hunted.

Other settings reverse the roles, giving the more violently direct expression to the soprano while the violin offers a coolly interpretive running commentary. But never is the relationship between the two lines merely one of soloist and accompanist. Mr. Schulte played the difficult violin part virtuosically and with impressive fluidity and color, and Ms. Csengery, an agile singer with an attractive, powerful voice that remains consistent across a broad range, put the texts across with animation (vocal and physical) as well as with evident joy.