Open Web Player
Where else could you summon up a chorus, three sopranos, a speaker, three harps and something that sounds like a jazz orchestra?
This piece specialises in some amazing vocal effects that have to do with the extension of vibration and note into time, like arrows flying through the air. There are instruments that actually finish a note that a singer STARTS, and then transforms it into a complex phrase, thus morphing and shape shifting the original utterance in a most amazing way.
The piece is lots of things - a ceremony - and a sequence of chants, piercing, beautiful moments of clear sound, curious tangles of notes from the harps, and (on this recording) the patient voice of Eduardo Sanguinetti. He sounds very old, and his very distinctive voice lends a unique and strange texture to a piece that is dominated by vocal brilliance by three members of the Swingle Singers (if you didn't recognize the names).
I have a copy of the score of Laborintus II, and while this performance is unmatched by any live performance I have ever seen to date, it is NOT the same exactly as the printed score.
Here you can actually hear the musicians break off at the end of the first section puzzlingly speaking to each other in French, and laughing "oh..je suis tres termine!", and this is most definitely not scored.
The beginning of the second piece according to the score should have the ensemble playing some extended jazz improvisations, Sanguinetti pronouncing some Dantesque poetry, the three singers and chorus doing equaly fascinating things, but the recording contains some quite different ideas, all of which work, and are ahout as insane and engaging as anything Mr Berio has ever invented. The piece seems to be something like one of the happenings that the Grateful Dead were involved in, and for all we know, perhaps everyone was so mellowed out that that is essentially what has been captured here.
I've seen the piece performed twice. In both cases it was different, so in no way do I have a real handle on what the true, or platonic ideal really should be.
It's also very challenging working out from the score how the various parts key together, but just listening this is a treat.
I first encountered this in Hatfield in a student dive where there was some marvellous blue smoke and squashy furniture and some buffs from teh science fiction society, who thought that it was completely crazy, and we all did, and I'm happy I met it that way. Any of you guys out there, please get back in touch!
