Charles Uzor - Mothertongue

The work of the composer Charles Uzor (*1961) reflects his African origins - and with it the story of his emigration to Switzerland as a seven-year-old. This also and especially applies to the new double album entitled Mothertongue.

Mothertongue is a five-part cycle for mezzo-soprano, tape and ensemble. Uzor is looking for the sounds of his own mother tongue, Igbo, which he lost as an adolescent. The overall program of the two CDs is a journey through Uzor's musical and spiritual cosmos. The works, created between 1989 and 2020, deal with the uprising on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the fairy tale of the Princess of Samarkand, the negative theodicy of the Italian philosopher Sergio Quinzio and the brutal murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis in 2020. Charles Uzor's topics are socially relevant. In this sense, this is a particularly haunting portrait of the Swiss-Nigerian composer.