Lucy Fitz Gibbon / Alexi Kenney

Two musicians PCMS audiences have come to adore, Lucy Fitz Gibbon and Alexi Kenney, embark on the complexities of renowned Hungarian composer and pianist György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments, an hourlong modernist theatrical masterwork. Simultaneously challenging and magnetic, its 40 intricately linked ruminations on the nature of time, space, and existence—all of which are excerpts from Franz Kafka’s diaries, letters, and notebooks—together express something both in themselves and as part of a larger context. By internalizing Kafka’s words and making them his own, Kurtág turns these settings into something uncomfortably personal and hauntingly beautiful.