De Decker: CORO

CORO: inspired by Luciano Berio's 31-song composition of the same name, George De Decker painted a cycle of 31 canvases. The key sentence Berio took as his starting point comes from a poem by Pablo Neruda: ‘Venid a ver la sangre por las calles’ (Come and see the blood in the streets) – a caustic reference to General Pinochet’s seizure of power in Chile in 1973.

For the exhibition of this cycle of paintings, De Decker wrote a composition for female voices. On the soundtrack, he incorporated vocal recordings of Els Van Laethem, Anne Marie Honggokoesoemo and Herlinde Ghekiere. At the request of pianist Geert Callaert, he added a piano part, so that CORO ultimately became a composition for solo piano, with a soundtrack with female voices.CORO is preceded by two new scores in the same sound idiom.

Part I consists of madrigals, in which the vocal parts always dialogue polyphonically – as a ‘coro’ – with the piano. The singer performing here is Els Van Laethem, who has been familiar with both contemporary and Renaissance music for many years. The finale is a ‘new’ madrigal: a vocal part composed by De Decker to a text from Carlo Gesualdo's fifth songbook: ‘S’io non miro non moro’.

The last painting – the outsider of the series – was given a musical counterpart. As a bridge to the CORO cycle, De Decker composed new music for Francesco Petrarch’s Sonetto XXXI.

Text: Guido De Bruyn / Translation: Stephen Smth