Giorgio Battistelli - Experimentum Mundi, avant-garde opera, CD, Italy- MINT
$ 3.96
Description
Giorgio Battistelli - Experimentum Mundi, avant-garde opera, CD, Italy- MINT. According to the CD review on Amazon, "For the past 20 years, Experimentum Mundi has been one of the most-performed works of musique concrète, i.e., music made with everyday objects instead of conventional instruments. In this work, 16 everyday tools are lined up on stage along with 16 workmen in aprons, and an actor in evening dress. The actor begins reading from the eighteenth-century Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert while the workmen make astonishing music with their tools and materials. The works of Giorgio Battistelli (b. 1953) are often linked to the theater, and even his instrumental works are highly dramatic, with various instruments and elements considered as characters in a drama. In 1974 he was a founding member of a leading avant-garde group in Rome and soon made his name as one of the most interesting composers of his generation." And this is an excerpt from the opera review in the UK Gramophone magazine: We all know that modern opera can be hard work; but Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli’s Experimentum mundi – An Experimental Opera (1981) spins that truism around its own conceptual axis. The subject of Battistelli’s piece is work. His hour-long composition is intimately concerned with the sounds created by craftsmen, and by those whose work is usually considered menial, who normally take no role in the discourse that surrounds modern composition. (...) you can’t make music theatre without breaking eggs, and Experimentum mundi finds its momentum with the pulse of eggs being whisked by a baker, a rhythmic itch picked up by the one professional instrumentalist in the piece, a percussionist who uses a pair of claves to carry the groove forwards. Cement is mixed; stone is chipped; a barrel is constructed by hammering nails into wood: sounds that generate a tangled polyphonic labyrinth of rhythms with their allied pitches. A narrator intones texts about the trades being presented on stage from Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie as a chorus of four voices gossip and chatter in the middle distance. The ‘plot’, though, is the narrative of the unfolding sounds – a living and breathing tableaux of actions not acted out onstage, but actually presented.
