Michelle O’Rourke and Ficino Ensemble: Folk Songs - Celebration of remarkable voice

Luciano Berio composed his 1964 Folk Songs to celebrate the very special voice of Cathy Berberian (1925-1983), muse to many leading avant-garde composers of the 1950s and 1960s. Berberian was a vocal chameleon with a range of over three octaves, enough, as someone once noted, for her to sing both Tristan and Isolde.

This new Ergodos CD is the celebration of another remarkable voice, that of Irish singer Michelle O’Rourke who, like Berberian, does not shy away from a style of tone production that sounds far more natural and untutored than most conservatory-trained singers, while remaining every bit as interpretatively sophisticated. She is, then, a kind of natural for the loving vocal showcase Berio wrote when he was still married to Berberian. The attraction of the Ficino Ensemble’s performance is limited by a recording that is more spotlit than blended.

The couplings are four new, rather more earnest-sounding engagements with folk song – Judd Greenstein’s The Green Fields of Amerikay, the most fully welded to folk song roots; Kevin O’Connell’s Late-crying voice, the most dissonantly free-ranging; Kate Moore’s Cronachdain Suil, the most immediately alluring; and Garrett Sholdice’s I Would Be Where I Am Not, the sparest and also the closest to the Berberian/Berio connection, as Sholdice and O’Rourke are also husband and wife.