Susan Narucki on György Kurtág

Soprano Susan Narucki first met György Kurtág in 1986. It was the year in which the Hungarian composer, then aged sixty, had completed his Kafka Fragments for voice and violin. Now, nearly forty years on, Narucki has committed her interpretation to disc in the company of violinist Curtis Macomber, the pair's recording newly released on AVIE. Narucki joined Presto to discuss approaches to this remarkable music, both from her positions as a singer and as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Music at University of California, San Diego, where she has worked for seventeen years. Talking to her from the sunny West Coast, we turn the clock back to that first meeting...

“I had the opportunity to sing Kurtág’s Messages of the Late Miss RV Troussova at the Ojai Festival, with Kent Nagano conducting. I was a few years out of undergraduate school, and I had never imagined that music could be this. It’s been a lifetime of exploration. Even when I was first encountering it, and trying to understand what the language was, I could see there was a fusion between emotional and musical expression that was very succinct and potent. In some ways, the difficulty and the beauty of it is that nothing is extra. There is nothing superfluous. To be able to bring it to life means to always be dancing on a knife edge. Even as a young person, a musician who could barely comprehend what was going on, I saw how fascinating it was, and it just drew me in.”

She elaborates. “One of the things in working with him, is this idea that music is alive when it's asymmetrical and spontaneous. By spontaneous I mean that one knows exactly what one has to do, but there's no sense of preparation before you begin. That is thrilling, but somewhat impossible”, she laughs, “and it’s taking those risks that make it alive and make it grow.”

And the first encounter with the Kafka Fragments? “After working on Messages, Kurtág gifted me with a stack of scores. Two pieces caught my attention – first the Attila József Fragments, for soprano unaccompanied, and the Kafka Fragments as well, which were just being premiered at that time. I got them in the composer's facsimile, so over the next few years I had a chance to travel to Hungary and work with him and do a number of his other works. I didn't approach the Kafka Fragments until 1990.”

She found the learning process fascinating. “I worked on this piece with many different violinists. I owe them a lot, because each one approaches the piece in a different way. What I learned was that I learned how to learn. If that seems a crazy thing to say, within each one of these fragments there's an entire world of detail. After working on the piece with many different violinists, everyone uncovers different levels of detail. Luckily, I'm a person who enjoys detail, but I will say it is a problem to wrestle with. How far am I willing to go? You can look at the notation and figure out how to execute it, but it's never completely what you dream it could be, because the piece has so many possibilities!”

Her response illustrates the sheer density of Kurtág’s compressed writing, which in an age of excess is a quality to treasure. “It is an amazing landscape to be a part of, and it's remarkable to situate yourself within this work in which comes out in verse, and then one has to regroup and find a completely different point of view to execute within a second or two. It’s all there – you just have to spend the time finding it.”

Does that mean recording presents a challenge to go for too many takes and seek perfection, or does the answer lie in a more instinctive approach? “In this recording, both Curt and I have worked on the piece for years and performed it many times. Before we started, we agreed that the sense that anything was going to be perfect would make the piece dead, so we tried to find something that was more instinctual, true to the moment and true to the process of recording. There are things where I think we might have taken a different approach, but it’s a recording, not a museum – a living thing.”

She agrees with the notion that imperfection is one of the beauties of listening to music. “It’s a living language – there isn't just one interpretation. The Kafka Fragments have been recorded many times by many wonderful artists, so what can we contribute to it? We can contribute how we hear it in the moment, what it is for us now.”

How best to prepare for four days recording a cycle of so many differing expressions? “It’s four days and forty years”, she smiles. “In terms of doing any type of recording, I'm very lucky to have worked with Judith Sherman, a producer who knows my singing and Curt’s playing. One has to think about when to do the most taxing pieces, and how to group things. Kurtág asks for so many different types of articulation and so many things that require stamina, but he really knows what the voice is capable of doing, so although it’s mentally tiring, physically it actually works well.”

She enjoys a strong musical bond with Macomber, which can be witnessed from YouTube clips of the piece. “I've known Curt since around 1990 and have worked with him many times. I've always found something very special in his playing. Like I said, I've worked with many spectacular violinists on this, and I'm grateful to them all, but Curt has a quality of being able to listen that is very rare. As collaborative partners, we are able to hear each other and enter into a common sound world without a barrier, which is a wonderful thing. There's a level of trust and a level of reciprocity that doesn't have to be discussed, it just grows.”

How much did she get to know Kafka himself in the performance of these fragments? She laughs again. “Kafka, c’est moi! I am continuing to work on a project writing about Kurtág's music, and this piece in particular. It is interesting to think about overarching themes that you find in Kafka's writing, that Kurtág has placed within the context of this work. There is the idea of alienation, of the ‘other’, or the strange potential of encounters in cities, with this kind of longing for ecstasy but always falling short. It's a whole world to get lost in, isn't it?”

In her notes accompanying the release, Narucki pulls out specific examples rather than write in detail about all 40 fragments. “I’m glad you asked about that”, she says. “I have some very dear friends in Vermont, who have an art gallery, and they allowed me to curate an exhibit of prints around this idea of the Kafka Fragments. There was a lot of writing that went on before that, and it got me thinking about the relationship between art forms. In a piece of musical notation, this whole world is contained within a frame, within the frame of a piece of paper. Looking at the different types of expression that one finds in visual art, and how these ideas relate to each other, that was actually the springboard for trying to write about these pieces.”

Writing about Kurtág’s music – from personal experience – is not easy, but in a good way, the writer often having to pick and choose specific moments. “It's tricky, because I was thinking about writing so that people twenty-five years from now, who pick up the score, may be able to say, “OK – what are the characteristics of this music? What can the notation tell me, and then what can someone who's lived with it and performed it tell me?” There are the ideas around the asymmetry of the notation, the potency of expression, the extremes, the musical material itself – and that hesitancy that's built in. How can we understand these things in terms of their effect in time and their effect in performance, so that it stays a living language?”

The new album complements The Edge of Silence, Narucki’s first Kurtág album for Avie, a collection of smaller cycles as opposed to this bigger one. Having worked with his music so intently, how does she Kurtág in a wider context of composers she has recorded, such as Schoenberg or Stravinsky, along with Bartók or Webern? Does the music come from anywhere? “The influence of the Second Viennese School is there in the immediacy of expression, some of the harmonic language, the flexibility in terms of execution. I think there's a real connection there, but also with Hungarian folk music, to Bartók. It’s a continuation of important strands of Western classical music that developed in the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century but is taken further in the rejection of the bar line. In the music of Webern and Schoenberg there is still a connection to the bar line that we're pushing against. In Kurtág that connection becomes more ephemeral, imaginary.”

Is that tricky when recording? “It's interesting that you should say this, because it brings an important point that a lot of people don’t get – it is an extremely intuitive musical language, a language you have to learn but one with its own integrity. At first, the lack of regularity in notation can be very forbidding. I’ve done Messages of the Late Miss RV Troussova several times, and sometimes players really find it impossible, because they expect the bar line. Once you realise that it's about the gestures, and how they relate to each other, it makes sense and can be liberating.”

Has working with Kurtág's music changed the way Narucki looks at life in general? She laughs again. “Yes, when we go out for dinner, I tell the same stories over and over again! No, I’m kidding. How can I answer this question? As I said before, I enjoy detail, and what I enjoy about small details is that they make me notice things that I otherwise would have missed, and I hope that they help me expand what I notice about the bigger picture of life, too. Working on this music for almost forty years has taught me to see in a way that I didn't think possible, to see as a musician, and I owe that to working with Kurtág. I still hear I still hear the things that we talked about in my head.”

Her experience with Kurtág brings interesting parallels with his contemporary Elliott Carter. “I worked with him a lot”, she says warmly. “He was a very funny individual and had such a purity of line and thought in his music. George Crumb I also met many times, along with Louis Andriessen, Pascal Dusapin and Mario Davidovsky. I've been very fortunate to work with some remarkable people, and I didn’t think this would be my life, but I’m very grateful that it is!”

Crumb’s music in particular seems to have been overlooked. “I agree with you about that. Again, this is somebody whose attention to detail in his scores is incredible, and I think people sometimes misunderstand the effect of his music and miss the detail. If you look at the Madrigals, they are exquisite – so concise in expression. He was a very humble and funny man.”

Given her previous remark on singing the music of such remarkable composers, what might Susan have expected instead as a profession? “I’m the first person in my family to ever attend a university”, she reveals. “I have no professional musicians in my family. When I was a young child, and talked to my father, he said, “You should do what you love”. To the chagrin of my parents, I did that!” I started pursuing music, and I was interested in the music of Charles Ives, so you could tell I was going in that direction. I didn't really know that this world existed to the extent that it does, or that there was a whole world of possibility. Luckily, I met people who helped me on this path.”

Another interview would barely cover the wonders of newer music that she has sung and / or recorded, but her appreciation of the chat is fulsome. “It’s really nice to talk with you about it, because as you know, our country right now is in a bit of a cultural funk”, she says with great understatement. “I do believe that we will prevail, but sometimes one does feel rather isolated.”

Is there a sense of fighting a rearguard action? “It’s everywhere. At the University of California we're already dealing with budget cuts. but then we have the federal government. I teach a class called Women in Music, about twentieth and twenty-first-century women composers. I love it, and it’s great – but the question has already been asked: “Do you want to retitle it?” No, I don't! Enough already!”

She agrees on the lesson from the twentieth-century and the importance of music, with its potential to transcend such views and division. “Absolutely. If I'm going to die on a hill, that's the hill to die on – and that’s OK with me!”