Over nearly 50 years, György Kurtág has composed several major song-cycles – Kafka Fragments being the biggest in size and scope. Written over an intensive spell in 1985-86, the selection and editing of texts had actually been taking place since Kurtág came across Kafka’s writings during his studies in Paris three decades earlier, and this release of creative energy permeates the music to a degree typical of this most inscrutable yet fiercely communicative of composers.

The combination of voice and violin should not be taken to imply emotional restraint, any more than the brevity of the texts imposes arbitrariness on the formal trajectory of this hour-long cycle. The 19 fragments of Part 1 present facets of a skewed but all-encompassing ‘world-view’ – set in relief by the lengthy single setting of Part 2, ‘The true path’, that is the becalmed centre of Kafka’s (hence Kurtág’s) expressive universe. The 12 numbers that comprise Part 3 build in intensity to the authentically Kafkaesque vision of ‘Scene on a tram’, with its sense of the surreal in the everyday, then Part 4 reconfigures previous gestures in a further eight numbers, culminating in ‘The moonlit night dazzled us…’, with its aura of bleak transcendence.

In its vast extremes of elation and despair,Kafka Fragments is both unnerving and inspiring. Juliane Banse is fully at ease with its myriad emotional shades and techniques of realising them – less mercurial than Adrienne Csengery and less intimate than Anu Komsi, but no less acute in her response. András Keller surpasses his earlier self in insight, with playing less varied but more plangent than that of Sakari Oramo. Recorded with spacious immediacy and extensively annotated, this is a fitting commemoration of Kurtág’s 80th birthday: no one thus encountering his music for the first time will be left unmoved.