Edgard Varèse, Luciano Berio, Betsy Jolas

Featuring: Gilbert Amy

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

A Disques Adès LP that brings together three composers whose relationship to the voice - its textural possibilities, its position between speech and melody, its capacity to become something other than a singing instrument - had produced some of the most radical vocal writing of the twentieth century. Edgard Varèse's Offrandes (1921), for soprano and chamber orchestra, is the earliest work here: an already fully formed statement of the approach to sound as pure sonic event, the voice positioned in a texture of extreme timbral density, the text (by Vicente Huidobro and José Juan Tablada) functioning as acoustic material rather than narrative vehicle.

Luciano Berio's Tempi Concertati (1959) extends this inheritance through the post-serial concern with multiple simultaneous musical spaces - a work of complex layering in which flute, violin, and chamber ensemble move in and out of phase with each other in what Berio described as an exploration of musical time as a variable rather than a constant. Betsy Jolas's D'Un Opéra de Voyage completes the programme with a work that demonstrates why this French-American composer deserves to be better known outside the Paris circles that recognized her importance: a theatrical imagination of considerable sharpness, allied to a compositional technique of equal rigor. Disques Adès, 16.012.