Anyone who looks at abstract painting should be able to follow it. If the music didn't change enough, the fault was Mr. Berio's, but as conductor, not composer. Standing before the O.R.T. Orchestra della Toscana, his gestures were rhythmically precise, but never varied. The musicians, watching him, were left on their own to find variety of touch and tone. The singer, mezzo-soprano Esti Kenan Ofri, with a voice too roughly textured to be fully classical, was like a synthesis of rock and flesh, a presence both sensual and prehistoric.
Every light is extinguished.
The scented orchard gives way to a withered vineyard, and the image of the Mother, uprooted from her land and cast down to a 'dry and thirsty ground,' evokes the memory of all the mothers of our time, of all the exiles and the havocs that have left deep wounds in our conscience. Those experiments were made, were welcome in the generation after World War II, and are largely over. But now we need more.