On 3 October, Cathy Berberian’s stirring voice on Luciano Berio’s musical score Visage filled the theatre at La Pelanda – Mattatoio, marking the beginning of a multimedia work that celebrated the centenary of the Italian composer’s birth at the Romaeuropa Festival. Four of the maestro’s scores followed one another without interruption: Visage, a work on magnetic tape for electronic sounds and voice with video by Lelli and Roberto Masotti, was followed by Les mots sont allés…, a “recitative” for cello from 1976-78, then Sequenza XIV for cello from 2002, both performed by cellist Claudio Pasceri with choreography by Simona Bertozzi, and finally the 1963 sound-video work I colori della luce with colourful moving video images by Bruno Munari and Marcello Piccardo.
From the moment the hypnotic video images created by Silvia Lelli and Roberto Masotti for Cathy Berberian’s voice in Visage first appeared, the theatre walls seemed to become an enormous auditory system, allowing the audience to project themselves inside Berberian’s body – her mouth, as if in a sound box that, deprived of words, emotionally amplified the sounds of her tongue, lips and throat, coloured by the singer’s comic and ironic sensuality.
Subsequently, Luisa Giusti’s lights illuminated Simona Bartozzi’s slender and plastic body, which, to the notes of cellist Claudio Pasceri, seemed to dismantle itself like an articulated mechanism, following the sound geometry that diversified its movements as it slid horizontally and vertically in the theatre space.
The sound of the electroacoustic voice first and then that of the stringed instrument – sometimes struck by the musician’s skilled hands – were layered in the dancer’s choreography: the words, also feminine, had disappeared, as the title of the piece suggested, abandoning language to make way for sound fragments that evoked the presence of the body, its noises and its colours. The latter resonated together with the last work, I colori della Luce (The Colours of Light), with electroacoustic music by Berio and the chromatic cheerfulness of the video projection by Bruno Munari and Marcello Piccardo, which once again illuminated Simona Bertozzi’s movements through the intangible medium of video. More than sixty years have passed since the electroacoustic equipment in the studios set up in Paris, Cologne and Milan allowed Luciano Berio and other composers such as Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna to investigate the phonological formants of voice and sound and recompose them as materials they used for their sound projects.
New sound diffusion technologies now make it possible to apply to the sound component the dynamics that they had experimented with since the beginning of their research, and the work accomplished in this show by the skilful sound direction of Francesco Canavese and Francesco Giomi – the latter currently artistic director of “Tempo reale”, a group and, at the same time, a centre for research, production and music education founded in Florence by Luciano Berio in 1987 – has made it possible to expand the space of the Pelanda theatre, set up for the occasion with multi-channel management of amplifiers that distributed and created a dialogue in the space between the different, countless sound components of Maestro Berio’s scores.
