(Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus)

Who’s afraid of a double bill? Part two. If Gluck’s Iphigénies required stamina from Aix operagoers, the double bill of Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King” and György Kurtág’s “Kafka-Fragments” beseech us to be attentive. It was just an hour and a half of music, and the performances were vivid. But the musical deconstructionism of Davies and Kurtág’s lyrically erratic nature might not be for everyone.

Barrie Kosky and Urs Schönebaum composed a minimalist staging—basically just the singers’ bodies and a spotlight. Still, one did not feel the need for anything else. Extracting everything they could from their performers, Kosky made their theatrical personas so grandiose that more often than not, I even forgot the insanity of their vocal lines—and how hard Davies and Kurtág’s scores are for anyone’s throat.

Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969)

In “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” we are presented with a clear response to 1968’s global movements. Though concentrated most emblematically in France, the experience of May ’68 is a global one (for a good take on it, please watch João Moreira Salles’s documentary “In the Intense Now”). Maxwell Davies invites us to see the musical embodiment of that moment’s imagined rupture with the past. The musical atmosphere is dramatically charged and disruptive: the orchestra opens with a loud sound, and progressively finds its way to small moments of lyricism and melody.

The Mad King, as performed by Johannes Martin Kränzle (sporting only his white undies), showed great resources of theatrical commitment. His cries, yells, and falsettos were all perfectly executed. Kränzle embraced Davies’s deconstructed approach to language without ever losing a sense of the text’s comprehensibility. Let me explain. In Opera—or lyrical singing in general—understanding the text is always a question. The act of singing often distorts what, otherwise, would be a simple sentence to understand. Nevertheless, some singers sing and enunciate the text in a way that makes the words clear. In Davies’ music, the distortions of the text are augmented exponentially—consonantal repetition, vowels on impossible high notes. Still, an English speaker, deprived of the subtitles, could capture most of the text—a sign of the artistic strength of the performance, and the success of Davies’s theatrical proposal.

The Madness of the king, here, is not pleasant to look at. However, at its best moments, it is pretty funny. The shy giggles in the audience might have been too little for the bizarre spectacle that unfolded before our eyes. Maxwell Davies’s works can be challenging, but accepting the humor they offer us is perhaps the first key to understanding and enjoying them.

The Kafka-Fragments (1987)

Kurtág’s “Kafka-Fragments” was certainly more engaging lyrically, but was still demanding. The forty fragments after Kafka for soprano and violin were meticulously performed by soprano Anna Prohaska and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. While Prohaska is an actress and singer of much presence, Kopatchinskaja is a violinist whose talent is, in my opinion, still underrated. Her recordings of the standard repertoire of violin are excellent, and in Aix, she shined as a performer.

Kosky placed the two women as mirrors of each other. They wore similar dresses and, progressively, they feign to change places—one sings and the other plays. The effect is quite impressive, and their commitment to the performative act is commendable. And Kurtág’s music is, by any measure, more pleasant than Maxwell Davis.

All that said, I must say that I struggled a bit with the fragment as a literary form in the current age. It is certainly an extremely important mode of literary creation, especially after the nineteenth century—though it can be traced back to the ancient times. But in this day and age of social media, when it seems that all of our “content” is fragmented (from stories to twitter to videoclips), even Kurtág’s intellectual elegance seemed to have lost some of its edge. Perhaps it is only me, too immersed as I am in my Instagram, but I do not think so.

Still, for the few elects that want to immerse themselves in a good performance of contemporary works and great theater, “Songs and Fragments” is certainly a show to see.