Kurtag

Ondulation is a fascinating album featuring spellbinding recordings of Bach’s Suites and Partitas on the guitar, interspersed by first recordings of György Kurtág’s four short pieces extracted from “Darabok a Gitáriskolának”…

Anyone familiar with György Kurtág's practices will probably expect his Kafka-Fragmente, Op. 24 (1985-1986), to be another of his open-ended works, pieces that exist in a state of potential revision that are intermittently subjected to changes. Yet for all its looseness of design and apparent mutability – one can easily imagine these extremely short movements rearranged in several different orders and for various instruments – this setting for soprano and violin of phrases from Franz Kafka's letters and diaries is complete and unlikely to be configured in any other version.

On Soli, Tamsin Waley-Cohen's 2015 release on Signum Classics, the violinist explores modernist repertoire composed between 1944 and 2005. Because these solo violin pieces by Béla Bartók, George Benjamin, Krzysztof Penderecki, Elliott Carter, and György Kurtág are challenging for both the player and the listener, one should approach this CD with some awareness that they reflect different phases of the avant-garde movement that dominated music in the last half of the 20th century.