György Kurtág: Kafka Fragments, Op. 24
Curtis Macomber (violin), Susan Narucki (soprano)
Awards:
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BBC Music Magazine, August 2025, Choral Choice
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Grammy Awards, 68th Awards (2026), Nominated - Best Classical Solo Vocal Album
[Narucki is] the latest in a line of distinguished singers taking on the challenge of these coiled little outbursts.The average length of these sections is just over a minute, and one of the...
György Kurtág: Kafka Fragments, Op. 24
Curtis Macomber (violin), Susan Narucki (soprano)
Purchase product
Awards:
-
BBC Music Magazine, August 2025, Choral Choice
-
Grammy Awards, 68th Awards (2026), Nominated - Best Classical Solo Vocal Album
[Narucki is] the latest in a line of distinguished singers taking on the challenge of these coiled little outbursts.The average length of these sections is just over a minute, and one of the...
About
GRAMMY Award-winning American soprano Susan Narucki is one of today's most committed advocates of the music of our time. Her deep and lasting working relationship with György Kurtág dates to 1986, the year the Hungarian composer penned his iconoclastic chamber work Kafka Fragments. Susan instinctively imbues the work with the widely varied moods of anguish, longing and rage alongside humour, absurdity and ecstasy that the texts convey.
Arranged over four sectis, Kurtág sets 40 extracts from the diaries and letters of the mercurial novelist Franz Kafka. Despite being his largest song-cycle, Kurtág deploys his signature miniature style: many of the movements last less than a minute long.
Joining Susan is one of today's foremost interpreters of contemporary classical music, violinist Curtis Macomber. Together they prove to be the perfect proponents of Kurtág's idiosyncratic fusion of poetry and music.
Contents and tracklist
Spotlight on this release
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Celebrating György Kurtág
19th Feb 2026
On the Hungarian composer's hundredth birthday, artists including Benjamin Appl, Quatuor Arod and Jean-Guihen Queyras share memories of the man and his music.
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Susan Narucki on György Kurtág
15th Jul 2025
In the wake of her acclaimed recording of the mercurial Kafka Fragments with violinist Curtis Macomber (released on Avie at the end of last month), the American soprano discusses her forty-year musical relationship with the Hungarian composer.
Awards and reviews
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BBC Music MagazineAugust 2025Choral Choice
August 2025
[Narucki is] the latest in a line of distinguished singers taking on the challenge of these coiled little outbursts.The average length of these sections is just over a minute, and one of the longest is a six-minute 'homage-message' to Pierre Boulez. Double-stopping by Macomber means that three voices can now be in play, with added beauty as a result.
August 2025
One of its chief assets is her ability to render these 40 settings as an unbroken while cumulative entity, knitting together those disjunctive epigrams of its first part as deftly as she does the ensuing items, not necessarily longer in duration but more developed in syntax.
