MacGowran Speaking Beckett Performed by Jack MacGowran. Claddagh, Cat# CCT3CD; 1 CD; €18.00. [Browse/Purchase]

Description from the Publisher:

Claddagh is proud to release, for the first time on CD, our great recording of Jack MacGowran reading from the works of Samuel Beckett. MacGowran in his time was the foremost interpreter of Beckett’s work, and the recording sessions were personally supervised by Beckett. Beckett’s nephews played programme music on organ and flute, and Beckett himself banged a gong. MacGowran’s voice is a beautiful instrument, and he plays perfectly on it the absurdly tragic humour of the author.

Tracks

1. From Malone Dies
2. From Watt
3. From an Abandoned Work
4. From Embers
5. From Molloy (1)
6. From Molloy (2)
7. From Endgame (1)
8. From Endgame (2)
9. From The Unnamable
10. Echo’s Bones

Read by Jack MacGowran
John Beckett: harmonium
Edward Beckett: flute
Samuel Beckett: gong

The music played is Quartet in D minor by Schubert

“... the whole thing’s coming out of the dark” With Raymond Federman, Barry McGovern, Natasha Parry & Uwe Dierksen. Intermedium Records, 2000, ISBN 3-934847-00-5; 1 CD. [Browse/Purchase]

A production created for German radio, “...the whole thing’s coming out of the dark” is an avant garde radio play that combines readings from Beckett texts with sounds and music. From the publisher:

“...the whole thing’s coming out of the dark” It was Samuel Beckett who used this term about the origin and quality of his radio plays, especially All That Fall, in a letter he wrote to his American publisher in 1957. And just 43 years later this description is the subject of a CD production, with selected texts by Samuel Beckett.

The recordings in this production provide an impressive documentation of Beckett’s “visual writing.” To the fore in the selection of texts for this CD (texts which also provided the basis for a subsequent audio-visual performance in the Kunsthalle in Vienna) were the author’s so-called “eye pieces” together with some of his observation and movement sketches: Molloy (1951), L’image/the image (1959) and Company (1980) – three texts from different phases in the life of the Irish author and Nobel literature laureate. They are read by the actress Natasha Parry and the actor Barry McGovern and by the American author Raymond Federman.

The playing directions for the instrumentalist on this CD (Uwe Dierksen) are derived directly from the so-called sucking stones sequence in Beckett’s novel Molloy, where the author has his protagonists invent three variations of the correct way to suck 16 pebbles – distributed between two coat or trouser pockets.

Additional Information
Although you may visit the Intermedium homepage, the best description of the CD is found on the Intermedium page hosted by The Samuel Beckett On-line Resources and Links site. There are also sound samples available online at UbuWeb.