(l. to r. Steven Copes, violin, Dawn Upshaw, soprano, Chris Brown, bass, Laurence Kaptain, cimbalom)
LK performed cimbalom on György Kurtág’s Scenes from a Novel with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in two performances February 12 and 13, 2010 with the world-renown soprano Dawn Upshaw.
Scenes from A Novel, op.19
When Kurtág was around 50 he took an intense interest in the poetry of Rimma Dalos, a Russian living in Budapest who shared his own sense of the fullness of the fragment. The two big works he based on her poems - Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova (1976-80) and Scenes from a Novel (1979-82) - are both song cycles whose individual numbers appear as splinters from some disaster of love and loss. Gestures are all the more intense for the lack of context and consequence. Dalos's words, taken from the page into the voice of a soprano, become those of a dramatic protagonist. Scenes from a novel are made into scenes from an opera.
The singer is accompanied by a tangy ensemble of violin, cimbalom (the Hungarian hammered dulcimer, which has featured often in Kurtág's instrumentation) and double bass. Not all used in every number, these instruments have multiple functions, setting the atmosphere, extending the singer's passionate expressions into wordless domains, seeming to interrogate the singer, or to ignore her. Musical forms and styles, too - rondo, waltz, ostinato - are never innocent but participate in the drama. However complex and various the means, though, Kurtág strikes through them with a naked directness.
Credit: http://www.psappha.com/watch-and-listen/gyoergy-kurtág-(born-1926)---scenes-from-a-novel,-op19.aspx
Paul Griffiths © 2008
www.thespco.org
Dawn Upshaw
Joining a rare natural warmth with a fierce commitment to the transforming communicative power of music, Dawn Upshaw has achieved worldwide celebrity as a singer of opera and concert repertoire ranging from the sacred works of Bach to the freshest sounds of today. Her ability to reach to the heart of music and text has earned her both the devotion of an exceptionally diverse audience, and the awards and distinctions accorded to only the most distinguished of artists. In 2007, she was named a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, the first vocal artist to be awarded the “genius” prize, and in 2008 she was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
During the 2009-10 season Upshaw performs Mahler, Berio, and Golijov on tour with David Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra. She also appears with Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic and sings the world premieres of three works written for her—a chamber piece by David Bruce with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, an orchestral work by Alberto Iglesias with the SPCO, and a song cycle by Osvaldo Golijov for Upshaw and Emanuel Ax. At Carnegie Hall this season Upshaw reprises her celebrated role in John Adams’s El Niño and takes part in a festival celebrating Louis Andriessen.
