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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
March 14, 2008
"For me he embodies purely and simply how music can be planned and thought today".
The words were written by Italian poet, academic and former Communist Senator Edoardo Sanguineti on the death of his friend and collaborator Luciano Berio.
One of the most successful of their collaborations is A-Ronne, for eight amplified voices, composed in 1974 for the Swingle Singers, which was the main work in Friday night's UVic Sonic Lab concert.
The title is derived from the mediaeval Italian alphabet in which A was the first letter and Ronne the last; the text, in several languages, also concerns itself with beginnings and endings: the work opens with "In the beginning was the word", from the Gospel According to St, John, and concludes with "In the end is my music"; and more than once we heard "in my end is my beginning", the opening line of T.S. Eliot's East Coker, the second of his Four Quartets.
Although A-Ronne could scarcely have been written in another age (or by another hand, Berio being one of the most instantly recognisable of avant-gardists) nonetheless a sense of historical awareness infuses it and one of the most effective (and difficult) passages involves the deconstruction of the Eliot line in a manner reminiscent of the early Italian madrigalists - or, if you prefer, of the classic Monty Python sketch featuring three men: "J Sm", "oh i" and "n th", who, respectively, speak only the beginning, middle and end of words.
The music itself is extraordinary - Berio was surely one of the 20th century's most original writers for the human voice. The vocalists are called upon to laugh, cry, shout, make a noise which sounded like a hamster chewing and even - as Ward Swingle remarked - to sing.
Paradigme gave a thoroughly engrossing performance of a very difficult work - they needed frequent recourse to tuning forks and seemed about evenly divided on the question of where on the body to strike it, with half opting for the side of the head and half for the knee (either of which will become painful after a while) - and several of the singers took turns in "conducting" (or at least coordinating) the ensemble.
A terrific performance of a great work.
While it is no doubt possible to read too much into the 1945 shooting death of Anton Webern by an American GI, there is still something terribly symbolic about the act.
Webern was one of history's great miniaturists, his entire published oeuvre lasting under three hours (there is also an equal amount of unpublished music). But for Webern short - no, let's not mince words, downright terse - pieces could still contain a world of emotion, for those prepared to go beyond the surface of his restricted and tightly-controlled idiom.
The Symphony, Op.21, lasts under ten minutes and yet, arguably, conforms to Mahler's dictum that a symphony should "contain the world" (Webern was also a noted conducter of Mahler's music).
Christopher Butterfield directed a performance which combined analytical precision with a lyricism all too frequently overlooked in Webern performances. The brevity of the work allowed for a second, even finer performance, which successfully redressed one or two slight hiccups in the first.
The evening opened with Craig Pedersen performing his own Different Noises for trumpet and electronics.
Although he - and his electronic support system - produced some interesting sounds and textures, I could not help but feel that they needed a more structured context.
Paradigme: Nicole West, Corinne Borgford, sopranos; Jamie Henigmann, Nina Horvath, altos; Jeremy Notheisz, Isaiah Bell, tenors; Cairan Ryan, Ryan Noakes, bass.
Sonic Lab: Krystal Morrison, clarinet; Kate Frobeen, bass clarinet; Ashley Cumming, Patrick Reikie, horns; Rosemary Beland, harp; Jennifer Whittle, Hollas Longton, Megan Kerr, first violins; Laureen Klein, Tina Park, David Hospedales, second violins; Anna Atkinson, Joe Hundley, violas; Alastar Crosby, Laine Longton, Jackie Fay, cellos.
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