Osvaldo Golijov has long felt a kinship with Berio's music, and he's created a song cycle, Ayre, to demonstrate Dawn Upshaw's vocal range, just as Berio did with Cathy Berberian's in his Folk Songs. Golijov says he “saw a rainbow" when he first realized the range of colour in Upshaw's voice. Upshaw says: “Ayre takes me vocally to places where I have never been before: in aesthetic terms, it's opened new doors." The cycle is scored for an ensemble similar to Berio's,
but also including the accordion and ronroco (an Argentinian variant of
the charango, a small South American fretted lute) and also the laptop,
which Golijov regards as a 21st-century folk instrument. The
klezmer-tinged clarinet solos were inspired by David Krakauer, the world's most celebrated klezmer innovator; two of the songs were written by Gustavo Santaolalla; Wa Habibi comes from the Arab superstar Fairouz; Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain is the inspiration for the final song. Golijov's
texts are in Arabic, Hebrew, Sardinian, Spanish and Ladino (the lost
language of Spanish Jews); his melodies are a meld of three cultures -
Christian, Islamic and Jewish - which coexisted peaceably in the Iberian
peninsula until the late 15th century.
Luciano Berio's Folk Songs for voice and seven instruments, composed 40 years ago for his wife Cathy Berberian, blazed the trail for composers wanting to blur the distinction between “folk" and “art" music. Not all of these eleven pieces are folk songs in the strict sense of the word: two are by the American composer John Jacob Niles and two are by Berio himself. But the others come from Armenia, France, Sicily and Sardinia, with one being an Azerbaijani love song recorded on an old 78 by a singer with a town band and aurally transcribed by Berio and Berberian themselves. Berio's scoring evokes a world beyond the concert hall: he uses the viola and cello to suggest the outdoor clarinet and folk fiddle, and he beefs up the flute and harp with tambourines and side drums.
For Osvaldo Golijov the music of Luciano Berio occupies a special place: “I always connected with it - he spoke to me with a directness, as Piazzolla had done when I was a child." (Michael Church
7/2005)
Luciano Berio's Folk Songs for voice and seven instruments, composed 40 years ago for his wife Cathy Berberian, blazed the trail for composers wanting to blur the distinction between “folk" and “art" music. Not all of these eleven pieces are folk songs in the strict sense of the word: two are by the American composer John Jacob Niles and two are by Berio himself. But the others come from Armenia, France, Sicily and Sardinia, with one being an Azerbaijani love song recorded on an old 78 by a singer with a town band and aurally transcribed by Berio and Berberian themselves. Berio's scoring evokes a world beyond the concert hall: he uses the viola and cello to suggest the outdoor clarinet and folk fiddle, and he beefs up the flute and harp with tambourines and side drums.
For Osvaldo Golijov the music of Luciano Berio occupies a special place: “I always connected with it - he spoke to me with a directness, as Piazzolla had done when I was a child." (Michael Church
7/2005)
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