Folk Songs

Berio, Luciano, Blaser, Samuel, różni kompozytorzy, Strasnoy, Oscar

Ensemble SONGS, Sun, Sarah Maria

SONGS 001 CD

Samuel Blaser (b. 1981) and Oscar Strasnoy (b. 1970) are inspiredby the great resource folk music and field recordings represent.Taking the instrumentation of Berio’s Folk Songs (1964) as theirstarting point (flute/piccolo, clarinet, harp, viola, cello andpercussion), each composer has immersed himself in the languageand sounds of a particular community. For Strasnoy it is the Swisscanton of Graubünden (Grisons), its Romansh language. For Blaserit is the music of America’s south, though sourced from three verydisparate groups. Blaser’s great trick in Work Songs (2019) is anaccompaniment of glorious complexity, aided by the addition toBerio’s line-up of trombone (Blaser’s own instrument), piano andjudiciously employed sound recordings – a gentle nod to theorigins of the material he so deftly elevates.

In his Chanzuns Popularas Rumanchas (2019) Strasnoy has pickedup this same gauntlet and created a sort of Graubündner DesKnaben Wunderhorn. If a Swiss Wunderhorn is the sourcematerial, the auteur here is more Wes Anderson. It is an Alpinecaper movie, with yodelling mountaineers and alphornists inlederhosen playing bit parts. And from these chance encounters,magic escapes the mundane.

One of the many paradoxes of the history of music in the 20thcentury is that Luciano Berio, an Italian composer of unlimitedtalent, a founding member of the post-war serial avant-garde,broke through the glass ceiling of the general public mainly thanksto two works that do not belong to him entirely, two modal works,even tonal, at the ideological opposite of the so-called Tabula Rasawanted by the guardians of the atonal temple, two works that hedid not even write entirely himself: the Sinfonia and the FolkSongs. It must be said that it takes a great personality, a bigmouth, to fail and face the ayatollahs of academicism bypresenting as his own a cycle of arranged folk songs. The statement that Berio makes through these Folk Songs is one thatevery great artist should make at least once in his life: "I am anartist, so I do what I like".

The ubiquity of Berio’s Folk Songs in no way undermines theirgenius and originality. Yet now Berio has two twentieth-firstcentury confrères, and worthy ones too.

CD

4.07.2022

0730706005015