About the Project
We - Stephanie and David - first chose to explore György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragments during the plague year out of a sense of accidental possibility. Concerts canceled, schedules cleared: here was a rare chance at immersion, an opportunity to study demanding “bucket list” music without distraction. Five months into the project, ten months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and thirty minutes into this song-cycle, we first encountered the words that reached into our current moment with force, rage, and clarity: “my prison-cell - my fortress.” We realized that this piece - in all its contradictions - was presenting us with a lifeline for a strange time, and a world of lessons for whatever comes after.​
About Kafka-Fragments
György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragments (1985/7?) sets found texts from the diaries and notebooks of Franz Kafka, building an hour-long journey of the soul from charged, aphoristic moments. Shorn of narrative structure and lacking any identifiable protagonist, its gradual unfolding is like the opening of an abyss. Images of searching - travel and motion, ways and paths - return with increasing frequency, until obsessive questions take shape: who is this music about? How should an artist create - from what materials are meaning fashioned, and in what direction do they point? What are the clues, the signposts, to a life well-lived? If most Western art music builds cathedrals of buttresses and domes, this music burrows inside: splitting the atom to fashion meaning from the smallest of parts.​
Listen & Watch
About the artists
Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, recitalist, curator and improviser, specializing in contemporary classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, Stephanie uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character… like an icepick through the skull” (composer Jason Eckardt). Her work has been described as “mercurial'' by I Care If You Listen and that she “sings so expressively and slowly with ever louder and higher-pitched voice, that the inclined listener [has] shivers down their back and tension flows into the last row." (Halberstadt.de) She has received awards from St. Botolph Club Foundation, John Cage Orgel Stiftung, and the Puffin Foundation. Stephanie has presented solo recitals at Roulette Intermedium, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Constellation Chicago, and she has collaborated with Wavefield Ensemble, Sō Percussion, Kate Soper, Jason Eckardt, Chaya Czernowin, Darius Jones, Dora Garcia (exhibition artist), Diemut Striebe (visual/exhibition artist), and Anne-Goldberg Baldwin (dance artist). She has taught and performed as Artist-in-Residence at several universities, including the University of California - Davis, Temple University, and CUNY Graduate Center. Stephanie was also a featured TEDx Speaker and Performer for TEDxWaltham.
​​
Violinist David Rubin brings intellectual curiosity and honest expression to wide-ranging musical projects: from historical instruments and gut strings to the contemporary chamber music of Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragments. David's love for modern music is informed by extensive study at the Lucerne Festival Academy, where he performed Stockhausen’s GRUPPEN with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle; toured Stockhausen’s INORI to the Berliner Festispiele and Paris Autumn; worked with composers Peter Eötvös, Luca Francesconi, Heinz Holliger, Helmut Lachenmann, Olga Neuwirth, and Wolfgang Rihm; and participated in a Klaus Huber retrospective at Kunstmuseum Luzern. Other formative experiences include the US premiere of Lachenmann’s The Little Match Girl at the Spoleto Festival; orchestral recordings with BMOP/sound; collaborations with dancers in D-Man in the Waters (Bill T. Jones-Arnie Zane Dance Company, Spoleto Festival) and Ballad Unto (Dwight Rhoden, Boston Conservatory); and performances at Music from Salem and Emmanuel Music. As an active member of Greater Boston’s musical community, David performs traditional orchestral music as concertmaster with the Cape Ann Symphony and assistant principal with the New Bedford Symphony, and period instrument repertoire with Providence Baroque. A dedicated teaching artist, David currently serves as Program Director & Resident Musician at musiConnects, a non-profit chamber music residency in the Boston neighborhoods of Roslindale & Mattapan, following a two-year fellowship at Community MusicWorks in Providence, RI. He holds degrees from Lawrence University and Boston Conservatory, with additional study at the Banff Centre, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and Lucerne Festival Academy.
Booking and Contact Information
To find out more about this project, and/or  to book a performance of Kafka-Fragments, please fill out this contact form to send a message.