Mike Patton and the Ictus Ensemble – Laborintus II

Mike Patton’s public love affair with Italian music continues apace with a fine performance of this seminal avant garde work. Ostensibly written to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth, the piece plays out like an elegant maelstrom of opera, free jazz, literary reference and experimental electronics.

Patton’s Italian language narration is a pleasure and finds the inimitable vocalist endeavoring to get his money’s worth from every last syllable – but it’s really the Ictus ensemble and the Dutch Chamber Choir who do most of the heavy lifting, providing a breathtakingly dynamic range of instrumentation together with vocals that range from sinister whispers to aggressively barked chunks of text.

The recording itself is exceptionally clear considering how crowded the live mix gets and the performance as a whole certainly stives towards fulfilling Berio’s own assertion that such experimental work should serve as “a laboratory reduced to the dimensions of performance.”