These five works of Vinko Globokar's range in date from 1966 (Accord) to 1983 (Discours VI), and all exploit the co-existence of music and text. Not the musical setting of texts: for Globokar, melodrama is the modern thing, and the record left me with the rueful conclusion that Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire has a lot to answer for.
The three solo pieces have their moments, especially Discours III, in which Heinz Holliger, with a little help from the technicians, creates a frantically active tapestry from multi-tracked oboe sounds and scraps of a Baudelaire text. Toucher is more sober, with a relatively narrow range of percussive taps and thwacks, and the speaking voice (some Brecht in French) never progressing to shrieks or howls. Voix instrumentalisee is the most extreme, since the bass clarinet (without mouthpiece) does not so much plumb the depths as suggest ever deeper plumbing.
Accord evokes the distant time when composers could create a sense of living dangerously by writing gurgles and groans for Cathy Berberian. But the instrumental writing in Accord has moments of strong characterization, and the vocalist, Mila Vilotijevic, is as mesmerizing as the great Berberian herself. Discours VI has none of these virtues, being scrappy in musical content and cliche-ridden in its vocal effects: also, at 22 minutes it is at least three times too long.
The recordings are well-engineered, the performances never less than spirited, but it is ironic to say the least that the two most substantial texts, Brecht and Sanguineti, are not provided, forcing the listener to concentrate primarily on the relatively thin musical invention.'