Andreas H. H. Suberg's Leonardo-Zyklus is a set of music scenarios after the prophecies of Leonardo da Vinci, for countertenor, trumpet and alphorn, percussion and electronics. The ten scenes on this first recording last over seventy minutes. They take Leonardo's enigmatic riddles, written in the late fifteenth century, as material for sound, theatre and present-day commentary.
Suberg was born in Essen on 13 March 1958. He trained in art with Franz Joseph van der Grinten, studied composition in Frankfurt and Darmstadt, and electronic composition with Hans Ulrich Humpert at the Cologne Musikhochschule. In 1990 he founded the Glasotronik project, and in 2000 the Klang Art Studio in Freiburg. He came to the prophecies while doing editorial work on a publication about Joseph Beuys's theory of sculpture, and worked on the cycle from 1995 to 2014. The performers are the countertenor Daniel Gloger, Paul Hübner on trumpet and alphorn and the percussionist Olaf Tzschoppe, with Suberg on electronics. The recording was made in September 2017.
Leonardo left around 166 prophecies. In form they are riddles, in content predictions of future events that the reader has to guess, and their ominous, oracular tone usually contrasts with a trivial solution. Suberg studied more than 150 of them and turned some into percussive sounds, taking the sonic suggestions of each text as his starting point. De' metalli (Of metals) and Delle campanelle (Of bells) play with metal and bells, and the two Delle pelle scenes (Of skins) work with skin. I dadi (The dice) becomes an aleatoric, performative exercise in the spirit of John Cage.
Other scenes connect the prophecies with current issues. Delle pelle II, the prophecy about balls for playing, is set in the context of modern football. De la bocca dell' omo ch'è sepoltura (Of the mouth of man, which is a tomb) deals with the life-despising methods of industrial meat production. The cycle also includes I papiri, Stigmata, Delle spade e lance and Delle bombarde. On stage the work also uses live electronics and video.
CD, Wergo WER 7380 2, released in 2019, first recording.
