ecarroll

Matthew,

The disc arrived yesterday (thank God for Amazon when you live in the woods). Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

Aerial is as wonderful as I remember it (better live though) (no surprise), Jet Stream is very good, and From the Wreckage is the real sleeper here. It's incredibly striking and beautiful at first hearing, don't you agree? I'll be getting my grubby hands on this score soon...

Again my thanks,
EC

mahaberio

All three works are wonderful. I tend to favore Aerial but I don't want to say it's my favorite just yet. I'm going to try to get the score sent my way pretty soon. Soon I'll devote some special attention to listening to the other pieces some more.

ilikethetrumpet

Snatches of a Conversation also features a 'noise-maker', a speaker whispering a collection of words, chosen specifically for their plethora of consonants into a mike which then is transformed electronically into what Eötvös describes as a "part eavesdropping, part percussion instrument". The words themselves are nonsensical or have no meaning and were chosen for their specific syllabic and consonant qualities imitating percussion, sounding like a brush on a hi-hat in the jazz style."[/quote]

This is very interesting, because Eotvos (sorry for no umlauts!) just produced an absolutely stellar recording of Berio's Sinfonia last year. Actually, all three versions that are in print (+Berio's himself, which is only on LP) are great. Famously, the voices chant slogans that comment on the music, and they tell stories in broken French here and there. But the voice is used also percussively. Some vocal lines will have pitches, others words, others words in time, etc. But Berio won't say "mumble," he'll write out, in time, something like "tkpqptcxv" but the letters are never the same. I think I'd have had a blast writing those syllables.

Eotvos's Berio disc came out in 2005, so it's anybody's guess as to when it was precisely recorded. "Sketches of a Conversation," however, was written in 2001. It seems that, trying to get his head around Sinfonia, Eotvos took the same idea of the Sinfonia--the idea that no matter how hard we try, we can't hear or experience everything at once, but that there is nobility in trying--and explored it through his own composition. Perhaps composing Sketches led him to Berio. I don't know, I'm just fascinated by little influences here and there. I get carried away.

ecarroll

Matt Brown (our Mazzrick, a student at McGill) played the solo off-stage trumpet part in Berio's Calmo last week at the Lucerne Festival. Boulez conducted and Berio's widow was in the audience.

Maybe he will tell us about it when he returns soon from the Ensemble Moderne Academie?

Best,
EC
ps: great post, Ilike...