Luciano Berio, Bára Gísladóttir, Gustav Mahler

In between a theatre of memory and journey to Cythera, the different voices in Luciano Berio's Sinfonia sing excerpts from Claude Lévi-Strauss, invoke the name of Martin Luther King, his assassination having only just taken place, and associates, in its emblematic third movement, Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable with Gustav Mahler’s magnification of the dying flames of the Viennese Empire in the Scherzo of the Second Symphony. However, Berio’s work is not about merely citing or reciting. It acts more like a skeleton, a load-bearing structure which invites us to harmonize the strata of history and travel between them. Almost twenty years later, Berio returns to Mahler, deconstructing five of his early lieder in order to bring out, through orchestration, the influences of Wagner and Brahms. Berio's strata find their counterparts in Bára Gísladóttir's circular movements and all-enveloping soundscapes. The musician provides proof of the attention she pays to thresholds, liminal rustlings, deep, cavernous basses, on which mysterious worlds are superimposed on each other, as well as to the distortions which dig nooks and crannies of vibration, and also to the work itself, a meditative one, in its capacity as an organism. As if observed from afar, and from continuously varied angles, it becomes a living being.