NEUE VOCASOLISTEN & BENEVENTI

“When the voice eats the word”

Truike van der Poel, mezzo-soprano

Andreas Fischer, bass

Simone Beneventi, percussion

Here we have a sampling of some directions representative of classical music from the late twentieth century to the present, inflected in the combination of voices and percussion, an extremely variegated range of the posing of the word as a term of comparison for the invention of the composer. An arc that begins from a page, Ogloudoglou, by that one-of-akind personality Giacinto Scelsi, who did not consider himself a composer but a kind of shaman, engaged in a sort of “mystical effort” to reach a “unique Sound”, a sort of estrangement that led to the evocation of an unknown language through a ritualisation of the sound gesture. Kurtag’s concentration of sound is another road. This time the sound and expressive gesture is based on the text of fragments; Kurtag chose twenty of them, for which Attila József is considered one of the greatest Hungarian poets, so the minimum quantity brings with it the maximum effect. A different case is the ancestral, cosmological and mathematical music by Iannis Xenakis. In Kassandra, the percussion assumes orchestral functions, paring them down to archetype, to rhythms and colours. The voice, too, is lean; Xenakis envisions that the singer extremely limits vibrato and is split in two between falsettos and deep zones, simulating the dialogue between Cassandra and the chorus, but the tension is not that which you might feel when being tossed about by the fury of a tornado but when you are in the unreal calm of its eye.