Applause breaks out at the end of this performance, but without the benefit of such visual effects as ''the multiple projection of photographic transparencies and film on themes like religious rituals'' I didn't feel much like joining in. Not even the wholehearted and warm-toned singing of Nicholas Folwell, supported to the hilt by Linda Hirst and all the other various speakers, shouters, singers and players, convinces me that Les Emigres begins to do musical justice to its dramatic theme. As Peter Handke's ponderous text for Part 3 puts it: ''a mortal should think mortal, not immortal thoughts''. Globokar's musical thoughts are mortal to a fault.
Les Emigres, composed between 1982-6, seeks to capture the hope and despair that goes with the modern experience of emigration (and immigration). Globokar's approach is a throwback to the avant-garde agitprop of the 1960s: there's even applause from the performers as in Stockhausen's Momente, and the kind of burbling, chattering collages for voices against sustaining instruments pioneered by Berio. Globokar seems unable to rise above the derivative and the inconsequential, and the effect (again, without the visual element) is often perilously like a send-up of a serious theme. Moments of welcome simplicity stand out: a folk-like song and a hymn-like tune are attractive for all their blatant sympathy-grabbing effect. There is also a long soprano melody in the later stages of Part 1 which suggests that an anti-avant-garde lyric style is what Globokar (b. 1934) does best. But it has no chance to flourish, and the absence of texts for this episode pushes the listener back into the dark.
The leaflet does include Handke's text for Part 3, and one can see why all Globokar can do with these pretentious meditations on borders and boundaries is to adopt a defensively melodramatic style, until the final decline into blessed simplicity. The recording as such places the solo voices too far back, especially in Part 3, but I doubt that a more favourable vocal balance would be enough to save the work as a purely aural experience.'