“Once I broke my leg; it was the most beautiful experience of my life” — sentences like this, which initially bring a smile but at the same time reveal a deeply serious undertone, can be found throughout Franz Kafka’s posthumously published diaries and letters. In 1985, the Hungarian composer György Kurtág set forty such fragments to music, creating a cycle for soprano and violin — a combination of almost startling intimacy.
Kafka Fragmente II
Programme
György Kurtág: Kafka-Fragmente for Soprano and Violin, Op. 24
Johanna Vargas, soprano
Ilya Gringolts, violin
Cast
Ilya Gringolts
One can hardly play the violin more expressively and uncompromisingly than Gringolts. Süddeutsche Zeitung, Harald Eggebrecht
Johanna Vargas
Johanna Vargas’s vocal beauty and coloratura virtuosity are matched by a compelling physical and theatrical presence, equally at home in theatrical and experimental performance settings as in the nuanced demands of chamber music and solo recitals in the concert hall.
A Colombian-born coloratura soprano, Johanna Vargas draws on her comprehensive training to make full use of her voice in all its possibilities. Her broad repertoire encompasses a wide range of musical styles and genres, from bel canto to Latin jazz, pop and improvisation. She combines this rich background with a profound understanding of drama and choreography in her performances. Thanks to her distinctive and versatile voice, she established herself with audiences and the press at an early age through a series of competitions. In 2015, she won the Hanns Eisler Performance Prize in Berlin. In 2018, she received the John Cage Prize in Halberstadt as well as a fellowship from the NUNC!3 Festival of the New Music Conference at Northwestern University Chicago.
Today, Johanna Vargas is one of the most sought-after sopranos for contemporary music. She has participated in numerous world premieres by leading contemporary composers, including George Aperghis, Carola Bauckholt, Wolfgang Rihm, Beat Furrer, Bernhard Lang, Chaya Czernowin, Lucia Ronchetti, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Johannes Kreidler and Vito Zuraj. Since 2019, she has been a high soprano with the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and regularly appears at internationally renowned new-music festivals including the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Eclat Stuttgart, Présences Paris, Wien Modern and Tongyeung, performing with ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien and the Arditti Quartet. She has appeared as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle, the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies, and Musikfabrik Köln under Peter Rundel.
From 2021 to 2024, Johanna Vargas was an Artist-in-Residence at the Fondation Royaumont in France. In 2022, she and her ensemble Duo LAB51 received a residency fellowship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Johanna Vargas studied in Bogotá, Bremen, Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. Her vocal teachers include internationally renowned artists such as Hartmut Höll, Mitsuko Shirai, Angelika Luz and Georg Nigl. Since 2018, she has taught contemporary vocal music and performance at the Karlsruhe University of Music.
References
“The singer Johanna Vargas, a member of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, has worked through these small scenes with great precision—not only vocally flexible and effective (...), but also thoughtfully conceived as a performer, dressed in a black suit with a versatile chair as a prop, as a cunning clown; (...) The violinist Ilya Gringolts contributes restrained gestural, yet musically intense interaction, with a truly powerful tone. This helps transform this collection of small pieces into a larger work for the stage...”
Albrecht Selge, VAN Magazin