MOORMAN, CHARLOTTE - CELLO ANTHOLOGY (4CD)

""Cello Anthology" is a collection of documents-sonic and photographic-as well as original texts and testimonials, made available for the first time in a unitary form, which permits a complete recognition of Charlotte Moorman's work. The biography and chronology faithfully reproduce the materials that the artist herself had ordered in booklet form. The range of her activity not only as an interpreter, but also as a promoter of the avant-garde artistic research progressively open to intersecting with the most varied disciplines-from music to sound and concrete poetry, form visual and plastic art to cinema and to video art-is moreover reconstructed through an unpublished text with which Charlotte Moorman meant to review the history of the fifteen editions of the New York Avant Garde Festival she organised between 1963 and 1980. Indeed, for the first time, the work of Charlotte Moorman can be appreciated by means of a significant selection of vintage recordings. The first two CDs highlight a pair of exceptional documents-a performance recorded by radio station WBAI in New York on 12 September 1964, and a concert from 25 July 1966 in the Theatersaal in Aachen, Germany. These events superbly represent the type of repertoire that Moorman and Nam June Paik cultivated and proposed in the US and Europe, in the years following their meeting, in their memorable 'duo' exhibitions. The programs of the two concerts present several homogeneous choices and others more clearly divergent. the third CD offers an in situ recording realised on one of the three days inaugurating the Paik retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, on 11, 12 and 14 September 1982. This version contains respectively the TV Cello Duets with Paul Garrin and the Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes, largely improvised, "including a tape collage by Ornette Coleman prepared for Charlotte, also talking with audience". The fourth CD restores three other documents, collateral but definitely not secondary. One happy example is a choral work performed on 3 September 1964, during the second New York Avant Garde Festival, a performance of Jackson Mac Low's composition The Long Hot Summer, sees in an exceptional reunion the names of Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Philip Corner, and Malcolm Goldstein, as well as Mac Low himself. Luxury edition including a 154 page book with original documents, full colour photos and scores; a set of 16 full colour inserts reproducing the original posters and programs of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York; 4 compact discs. Slipcase edition limited to 250 copies." (label info)