Wyatt canta Rimbaud in un lavoro di circa mezzora che la compositrice Elizabeth Purnell ha tratto dalle pagine immortali di Una stagione all'inferno. Si ascolta sabato 14 novembre, all'interno del programma 'Between The Ears' di BBC Radio 3, a partire dalle 22.45 ora italiana.
Composer Elizabeth Purnell has created a soundscape for Arthur Rimbaud's work A Season In Hell, which was written between April and August 1873 in London and France, when Rimbaud was 18 and in the throes of an intense, transgressive and destructive relationship with Verlaine.
Purnell's setting includes composed music, field recordings and processed sound in a raw response to the words. She set the poems specifically for Robert Wyatt, whose voice, in its high, delicate register, suggests a beyond-the-grave alter-ego to the young Rimbaud.
A mixture of autobiography and enigmatic dream sequence, A Season In Hell sees Rimbaud look back in despair over his life as a poet, combining lucid self-appraisal and hyper-realism with demented vision and hallucinatory surrealism. The 25 pages of A Season In Hell – cut here to a third of its length – are both a staggering testimony to and a tortured recantation of Rimbaud's poetic credo, the "disordering of all the senses".
