Coro

"Recommended: Luciano Berio's Coro is not only one of the composer's absolute masterpieces, but also an important addition to the twentieth-century's choral repertoire ... Coro is scored, unusually, for 40 voices paired with 44 instrumentalists ... The Norwegian Soloists' Choir and musicians from the Norwegian Radio Orchestra under Grete Pedersen excel in bringing the piece to life with an extraordinary balance between singers and instruments. She does an amazing job in matching the vocalists with their instrumental partners ... After Coro one needs something lighter and less complex. BIS provides the perfect disc mate in the contemporaneous Cries of London that Berio composed for the six male voices ... The Norwegian Soloists ... seem to make light of the work and are obviously enjoying its text without ever going over the top. It is really quite amazing ... These extraordinary performances would be for naught were it not for the lifelike recording that gives enough space around the performers, yet allows for plenty of clarity".

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"Just what was Berio trying to achieve in the meticulous, variegated, sensitive, textuer-obsessed, micro/macro-experimental masterpiece for 40 voices and 40 instruments that is Coro? ... Two features stand out: first, its tendency to put a revealing slant on Berio's particular form of expressionism by keeping it allof-a-piece - a single canvas; second, its prioritising of the composer's interest in merging instruments and voices to the point where on occasion neither is identifiable as one or the other ... Pedersen achieves both through judicious matching of individual voices to each other and to instruments ... Everytime this excellent choir issues a new recording you wonder what will come next, but there hardly seems anywhere left after this".

"Vurdering: Diapason d'or".