<<  -- 5 --  Jennifer I Paull    CATHY BERBERIAN: LEGACY

Although liberally applying her outstanding gifts for witty parody and mimicry when appropriate, Cathy Berberian never compromised her intense intellectual direction and scholarly musicianship. She was a natural teacher. Her public left every performance the richer for having learned valuable lessons about music and composers in situ. Cathy knew instinctively how to wrap the members of her public around her little finger. If she sensed they were aloof or distant, she went out of her way to talk to them (in their own language more often than not) and seduce them. She could improvise stories, witty comments and tales about her repertoire, until she had them all exactly where she wanted them -- captivated.

Florence Foster Jenkins inevitably fell prey to the barbs of Cathy's parody. Her Holbein brush strokes painted Mrs Jenkins' portrait in the settings of a Parisian salon or a Ladies' Saturday Afternoon Cultural and Literary Society meeting somewhere in the Mid West: the most unlikely of picture frames. From the United States to the United Kingdom, Europe to the Antipodes, audiences howled in appreciation of Cathy's ability to sing out of tune with a perfectly straight face and imitate that amazing lady of yesteryear with such follies-de-grandeur. Mrs Jenkins had been able to hire Carnegie Hall and fill it repeatedly to overflowing with those, she imagined, had come to hear her 'talent'.

But what was really avant-garde? Was it for Cathy to become the sweetheart of living composers who saw her gifts and seized upon them? Was it to create original and witty programmes of musical cleverness? Was it to produce the attention to detail of which one can hardly conceive in the computer-less world in which she lived? In reality, was it not, to draw the minds of her audiences to the new and different in every respect? Cathy Berberian's real contribution to the avant-garde of her day, was to dare to present, perform and bring all her unknown repertoire to light. Neither when the music was composed, nor the vocal technique it required, were relevant to her being ahead of her time in her conception of all styles of musical interpretation.

Operetta and Monteverdi mixed with The Beatles and Florence Foster Jenkins via German Lieder, Russian Romantics and a sprinkling of Bussotti, Berio and Weil is more a triple Olympic Triathlon than the recitalist's safe, conventionally fenced paddock.

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