Opening of the Mouth

ABC Classics 465 268-2 Richard BARRETT's Opening of the Mouth for ten instrumentalists, two singers and conductor with electronics and tape Total timing 72:16 Released 2000

Opening of the Mouth is a major collaboration between ELISION Ensemble, composer Richard BARRETT and installation artist Crow. Premiered in 1997 in the abandoned Midland Railway Workshops outside Perth, Western Australia, the work draws its inferences from two sources; one belonging to this century, the poetry of Paul CELAN, and another belonging to the early civilisation of ancient Egypt--the ritual of the Opening of the Mouth. This ritual was concerned with the giving of `voice´ to the dead soul so that it could bear witness to the events of its lifetime: a restoration of speech becoming a restoration and recovery of human experience.

` . . .  Barrett's ambitious work professes to use the poetry of Paul Celan to cleanse the language of artistic utterance in the century of the Holocaust  . . .  In lesser hands this might read as pretentious rather than ambitious, but Barrett's tortuous vocal lines and tremulous instrumental textures make for a work of real power and concentration. Barrett himself is on live electronics; among other remarkable performances is Carl Rosman's portrayal of Charon the boatman on bass clarinet; koto and Harding fiddle add folk-exotic colour.´
--Andy HAMILTON, The Wire 202, December 2000

` . . .  The effect is thus the more striking when one of the vocalists in the piece Tenebrae, halfway into the cycle, suddenly breaks into the most spinally shrilling excesses this critic has ever heard; a horrible, but virtuoso, display of the most terrifying aspects of modern vocal technique, and that to excess used to a text extraordinarily explicit to be Celan. However, the commenting elements are usually left to the instrumental ensemble.

`It is in this wordless domain that the desperate powerlessness finds expression, represented by a number of neckbreakingly spectacular and red-hot expressive solos, exquisitely performed by the nine musicians in the ensemble. It is here Barrett manages to approach the atrocities smouldering under the text, and just as Celan's poetry is a distortion of language, Barrett shows us a distorted picture of the wellknown instrumental sounds. Here the musicians scratch on string instruments, howl, wail and whine in clarinets, as if the musicians only have remnants of tecnique and instruments left. It is a kind of music veritably tasting of ashes and dust  . . . '
--Bendik HAGERUP, Morgenbladet, Oslo, February 2000
Translated by Thorbjørn Tønder HANSEN

Performers and Production

Deborah KAYSER soprano, Ute WASSERMANN mezzo soprano, Paula RAE flutes, Carl ROSMAN clarinets, Peter NEVILLE percussion, Denise WAMBSGANß mandolin, mandola, Geoffrey MORRIS 10-string guitar, Daryl BUCKLEY 12-string guitar, electric guitar, Satsuki ODAMURA kotos, Mary OLIVER violin, viola, hardanger fiddle, Friedrich GAUWERKY violoncello, Simon HEWETT conductor, Richard BARRETT live electronics, Crow installation artist

Robert PETTERSON, Lyle CHAN, Daryl BUCKLEY executive producers, Richard BARRETT, Andrew KUROWSKI, Phillip TAGNEY recording producers, Marvin WARE, Graeme PETRIE-BROWN recording engineers, Richard BARRETT, Daryl BUCKLEY, Jim ATKINS mixing, editing and mastering

Crow cover and installation images, Peter McCALLUM essay, Ashley de PRAZER, Heidrun LÖHR photography, Imagecorp design

Recorded at BBC Maida Vale Studios, London, 6-9 April 1998. Mixed, edited and mastered at ABC Southbank Centre, Melbourne, 7-10 January 1999. Electronic music realised at the Institute of Sonology, The Hague, and at STEIM, Amsterdam; bass clarinet recordings by Carl ROSMAN