Kafka's words in a composer's private wilderness

On Saturday night Music From the Library, in its 12th season, presented the soprano Tony Arnold and the violinist Movses Pogossian in a performance of Gyorgy Kurtag's "Kafka Fragments," one of the most spare and harrowing chamber works written in the last three decades. A capacity crowd braved the bitter cold to turn out for this free program, and they were rewarded with a concert that was easily the most memorable of the new year.

And this despite the fact that the cheerful and very brightly lit rotunda in this suburban library made an awkward backdrop for this dark work - full of night, shadows, and a distilled existential angst of European vintage. But thanks to a performance of enormous skill and conviction by these two young musicians, the piece still hit its mark.

Kurtag, who at 82 is widely acknowledged as Hungary's greatest living composer, wrote "Kafka Fragments" in the 1980s. Having lived for decades under stifling communist rule, the composer found a kindred spirit in the private writings of Kafka, who died in 1924 and yet peered with uncanny depth into the abyss of Europe's future. The true nature of Kafka's private experience, Walter Benjamin chillingly observed in 1938, "will probably first become accessible to the masses at such time as they are about to be annihilated."

Kurtag's "Kafka Fragments" is made up of 40 independent settings of short epigrams taken from Kafka's letters, diaries, and notebooks. The texts are actually quite varied in tone and are not unified by any particular narrative, though Kurtag has confessed that the work as a whole is autobiographical, a kind of fractured journey into a composer's private wilderness. Indeed, the piece's original title, taken from one of the fragments, captures the essence of Kurtag's plight as a composer for whom the painful isolation of life behind the Iron Curtain also encouraged a kind of radical self-reliance. Or as the soprano sings: "My prison cell - my fortress."