Kurt Schwertsik: Kafka Amerika ballet success in Linz
Kurt Schwertsik: Kafka Amerika ballet success in Linz
Kurt Schwertsik's new ballet score, Kafka Amerika, was successfully premiered in Linz last October.
“The audience at the premiere had every reason for loud cheers.” So wrote the Wiener Zeitung of the successful world premiere in October of the full-evening ballet Kafka Amerika in which “Schwertsik’s version of Franz Kafka’s text surpasses many opera performances in dramatic terms.” With choreography by Jochen Ulrich, the ballet enacts Kafka’s fragmentary first novel in which a young European immigrant searches for work and identity amidst an idiosyncratic vision of America. The premiere at the Landestheater Linz featured the Bruckner Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, who has done much to champion Schwertsik’s music.
“Jochen Ulrich didn’t rummage around for suitable music, but – and this was absolutely right for such an important project – looked for a composer, and certainly found the right one in Kurt Schwertsik. His music is just as fantastic as Kafka’s text: he plays with quotations, flirts with modernisms and yet remains wedded to traditional harmonies. A score of outstanding ballet music which not only manages to line up ‘danceable’ rhythms next to each other, but over and above that, characterises the individual personalities musically with unbelievable precision... a particular, passionately flourishing music.”
Oberösterreichische Nachrichten
“A triumphant evening with wondrous music by Kurt Schwertsik... The out and out sense of insecurity, the circling threat of disaster, the jet-black poetry of Kafka’s world is plumbed by this score of almost two hours, with unbelievably great sensitivity, with minimalist obduracy, but always leading into vigorous drama at the right moment. With this are contrasted the striking songs of Karl’s alter ego, many dance rhythms between waltz and swing, and a virtuoso bar piano interlude… In the finale, the composer arrives at a tableau full of captivating melodic power, an irresistible dream music.”
DrehPunktKultur Salzburg
“Schwertsik’s often powerfully rhythmical, always melodically moving music seems to come from the heart, and also has a distinctive sound. His sound. Amerika sounds unmistakably like Schwertsik.”
Die Presse
Schwertsik’s music is much in evidence in Manchester currently with the world premiere of his orchestral work Nachtmusiken by the BBC Philharmonic last month and a two-day focus on the composer hosted by the Royal Northern College of Music on 23 and 24 February. Events culminate in a concert by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by HK Gruber which includes Schwertsik’s recent Divertimento Macchiato with trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger as soloist, and the environmentally conscious Irdische Klänge (Earthly Sounds) cycle of orchestral works.
> Further information on Work: Kafka Amerika
Photo: Kafka America at the Landestheater Linz, music by Kurt Schwertsik, choreography by Jochen Ulrich.
