Bel Canto & the Beatles

Massachusetts-born Cathy Berberian is not only a singer of note but also a singer of sounds. Her expressive voice, ranging three octaves from contralto to coloratura, enables her to handle every thing in the standard repertory, but Cathy prefers to specialize in avant-garde music. Impressed by her ability to mix bel canto with barks, grunts, moans and sighs and to compete vocally with tape-recorded noises and electronic beeps, such experimental composers as John Cage, Sylvano Busotti and Luciano Berio (her estranged hus band) have helped make her the undisputed diva of the daring (TIME, Oct. 4, 1963) by creating pieces for her. Currently, she is fluttering far-out circles by doing something unusual even for her -- singing Beatle songs.

Lonely People. The idea started when she began singing along with her 13-year-old daughter's Beatle records at home in Milan, where she has lived since 1950. The plaintive Eleanor Rigby, a lament for lonely people, impressed her as "one of the most beautiful I'd heard in years." She began spicing her recital programs with Beatle numbers, arranged in classic styles by artists such as Pianist Peter Serkin, who scored a contrapuntal Bachground for Yesterday. She has now recorded a dozen Beatle songs on an LP called Revolution, which was recently released in the U.S. on the Fontana label in a jacket that sedulously apes the Beatles' last album, Revolver.

Though accompanied by a string quartet, harpsichord, organ and woodwinds, Berberian wisely resists the temptation to patronize the Beatle music or gimmick it up. There may be comic incongruity in her highfalutin version of Yellow Submarine, and Paul McCartney, surprisingly enough, sings Eleanor Rigby a great deal more movingly than Cathy does. Yet in such waifish songs as Michelle, Here There and Everywhere and Yesterday, her tasteful, straightforward singing warmly underlines John Lennon's lyrics and McCartney's inventive melodies.

Vocal Fantasy. After taping songs by the Beatles, Purcell, Falla and Weill for Dutch television in Amsterdam, Cathy Berberian made a pilgrimage to London to meet McCartney, who told her he was beginning to dig her kind of songs, too. "I used to think that anyone who was doing anything weird was weird," he explained. "I suddenly realized that anyone doing anything weird wasn't weird at all, and it was the people that were saying they were weird that were weird." Berberian apparently had no difficulty in understanding completely. "Whether serious or pop," she said, "all music is only as valid as it reveals itself in performance. Paul McCartney writes good music."

After rippling off a new recording in Cologne (mostly Stravinsky), Cathy got home to Milan in time to welcome her new record of Berio's Circles and Sequensa Ill, and to prepare for next week's Contemporary Music Festival at Geneva. There she will do her own composition Stripsody, an unaccompanied vocal fantasy based on themes from the comic strips. Sample lyrics: "Arrgy . . . Gulp . . . Good grief! . . . Blam . . . Blam . . . It's Superman!"

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