Classic performances of classical high avant-garde music
scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 12/16/1999
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Luciano Berio was quick to marry Cathy Berberian, and the two collaborated in wonderfully interesting works. Berio's imagination is voice and orchestra, and he has few equals of his generation. In fact the other buddhas, Stockhausen and Boulez never resolved the vocal problematics, and the fusion of the dimensions of the human voice with instruments, Cage and Carter can also be mentioned as un-voiceless creators. The Sequenza #3 is a tour de force for the voice. It requires the singer without the aid of accompaniment to babble, crune,quip,shout,make percussive noises,baby-sounds,sounds of sexual engagement and yes singing. Berberian is wonderful. She understood this music perfectly capturing it's spontanaiety, and anarchic gesturing seemingly going nowhere. Everything, each gesture was for the moment, some call this existential. That was around still lingering in the late Fifties and early Sixties when this music was written. Likewise Vinko Globokar and the trombone Sequenza #5 is marvelous. He studied composition with Berio, but besides that Vinko had an imagination for the extended sound. Multiphonics, that's where you blow and sing simultaneiously and an ethereal, haunting like ambience is the result. The piece has high drama, with fast quips, rips, and plunger-muted moments of snarls and barks. You need to were black tails concert dress when you perform this piece, inspired by the celebrated Italian clown Glock. The Flute Sequenza is now part of the flutist vocabulary, after Syrinx of Debussy and Density by Varese. This has ample amounts of fluttertonguing, all to disrupt the otherwise vocal like lines. And that's Berio's aesthetic strategy here,utilizing his vocal imagination imparting it,probing the pallette of instrumental, adding a few on the way. Circles as well, with a massive array of percussion instruments,mallets and hand-held objects accompany the voice. And a primitiveness results in this vocal-percussive synergy."
Track Listings (4) - Disc #1