Berio: Circles; Sequenzas 1, 3 & 5

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Berio has been writing the Sequenzae, a series of works for solo instruments, since 1958. Each Sequenza can be compared to a brief character sketch; each is unique and highly poetic. Berio avoids the tedium inherent in many contemporary studies for solo instruments through a preoccupation with the theatrical aspect implicit in the performance situation itself--another of his long-standing concerns. This disc couples three of these solo works--for flute, soprano, and trombone--with a classic setting of E.E. Cummings for soprano and percussion entitled Circles, a remarkable piece sung by the superlative Cathy Berberian. --Joshua Cody --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Tracks:

Circles - Cathy Berberian/Francis Pierre/Jean Pierre Drouet/Jean Claude Casadesus
Sequenza I - Aurele Nicolet
Sequenza III - Cathy Berberian
Sequenza V - Vinko Globokar

Amazon.com

Berio has been writing the Sequenzae, a series of works for solo instruments, since 1958. Each Sequenza can be compared to a brief character sketch; each is unique and highly poetic. Berio avoids the tedium inherent in many contemporary studies for solo instruments through a preoccupation with the theatrical aspect implicit in the performance situation itself--another of his long-standing concerns. This disc couples three of these solo works--for flute, soprano, and trombone--with a classic setting of E.E. Cummings for soprano and percussion entitled Circles, a remarkable piece sung by the superlative Cathy Berberian. --Joshua Cody

Customer Reviews:

classic performances of classical high avant-garde music.......1999-12-17

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.

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