To celebrate 900 years of city rights for the city of Utrecht and to welcome the European choral event Leading Voices to Utrecht, the Netherlands Chamber Choir is publishing a new recording of Luciano Berio’s Cries of London, recorded in the Werkspoorkathedraal in Utrecht! In this extraordinary work you can hear the cries of the street vendors in London echo against the old houses of the metropolis. Berio, who gathered his inspiration for this work by walking through the street markets in London, has the singers use various and sometimes rather unique techniques, from humming to coughing and singing through closed teeth.
This video is a fragment from our video recording Downtown Uptown, which will be published in October 2022. In Downtown Uptown, the Netherlands Chamber Choir brings a musical hommage to the city in all its shapes, from a bustling metropolis in Berio’s ‘Cries of London’ to a memory of the desolate streets during the pandemic with Di Lasso’s masterful lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah, based on the destruction of the city of Jerusalem. The music in the video is interpersed with readings by poet Radna Fabias, winner of ‘De Grote Poëzieprijs 2019″, an important Dutch poetry award. For her debut Habitus she let herself be inspired by the city and city life.
Cries of London – Luciano Berio
Netherlands Chamber Choir (Nederlands Kamerkoor)
Peter Dijkstra chief conductor
recorded in Werkspoorkathedraal, Utrecht
