There was a time when the classical avant-garde and more popular musical styles were on closer terms than they are now. A close relationship of this kind can still be heard now in the music of the indie classical composers _ artists like William Brittelle, Mario Diaz de Leon and Caroline Shaw, for example _ and in the work of individualistic rock artists like Bjork, who speaks of her admiration of Stockhausen's work. But a few decades back the flow of ideas back and forth was much more widespread. Listen to the more radical songs by the Beatles, or numbers by jazz artists like Cecil Taylor or John Coltrane, and then to some of the contemporaneous creations by advance-guard classical composers and it's clear how new ideas were being exchanged and adapted.
BERIO: Sinfonia; Nones; Allelujah II; Concerto for Two Pianos. Swingle Singers, New York Philharmonic conducted by Luciano Berio (in Sinfonia); London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Berio (in Nones and the Concerto); Bruno Canino and Antonio Ballista (pianos, in the Concerto); BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Berio (in Allelujah II). ArkivMusic/Sony CD 49992 or download. Available from Amazon, iTunes, and other online vendors.
One composer who found a very receptive ear among pop musicians and listeners was Luciano Berio. When his Sinfonia, performed by the Swingle Singers vocal ensemble and the New York Philharmonic, was premiered in 1968 under the composer's baton it caused a sensation. A short time afterward CBS (now Sony) issued the piece on LP, and soon it was stacked up in many record shops together with the pop discs. It sold so briskly that one shop in my then-neighbourhood in Washington, DC had trouble keeping it in stock. It is one of the few classical pieces that captures the schizophrenic mood of that era as fully as its best pop music did (Ligeti's Requiem, Stockhausen's Hymnen, and Cage's HPSCHD are other classical contenders).
The version of Sinfonia heard at the premiere and recorded by CBS was of the original four-movement work. A year later Berio added a fifth movement, which is played on all subsequent recordings. This addendum has always sounded like an afterthought to me, especially since the brief fourth movement makes a perfect conclusion. What's more, as a performance the first Berio recording is so vastly superior to any of the ones that have followed that it is definitely the one to have.
As with so many of the recorded modern music treasures of the 1960s and 1970s, listeners who loved the performance gave up hope decades ago that it would ever be transferred to CD. Despite its initial success, Sony may have ignored it because of the missing fifth movement. But now it has been made available again as part of ArkivMusic's new Sony "Prophets of the New" series as either a CD or a download, and while the original LP release was of just the 27-minute Sinfonia, ArkivMusic have added three additional Berio pieces once released as RCA LPs.
Sinfonia is dream music, especially its famous third movement, one of the most convincing evocations I know of in art of the dreaming mind. The opening section, introduced by a gong stroke and the Swingle Singers quietly introducing a deep-blue chord that will dominate the rest of the movement, is a roiling, shape-shifting, melange shot through with sung, shouted, whispered and chanted extracts from Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked and volcanic eruptions from the orchestra. This may sound academic and pretentious, but in performance it is startlingly dramatic, even frightening. It is followed by a movement dedicated Martin Luther King, whose assassination was still a painfully fresh memory at the time that Sinfonia was composed. It atomises his name into syllables and phonemes that are gently woven by the individual Swingle Singers into a luminous, gorgeously-orchestrated music fabric until, at the end, his entire name is assembled.
The heart of Sinfonia is in the third movement, which is almost as long as the other three combined. In liner notes to this CD the composer describes it as "a kind of 'voyage to Cythera' made on board the third movement of Mahler's Second Symphony", as well as an homage to Mahler, "whose work seems to bear the weight of the entire history of music". He cites it as the most experimental music he had composed up until that time. This is quite a statement, considering the radical nature of some of his music from the 1950s and earlier 1960s, but it is true that it resembles nothing else and that no one has written anything to compare to it since.
Besides the Mahler movement, it is also made aboard the text of Samuel Beckett's novel, The Unnameable, a work propelled by an increasing sense of panic, its sentences shortening as the narrator's terror mounts. This narrative is intermixed with other texts that include graffiti written on walls during the Paris protests of 1968, Berio's own diary, and more. The composer's remark about Mahler's music bearing the full weight of musical history is reflected in the collage-like content of the music, in which the lilting Mahler movement, marked In ruhig fliessender Bewegung, flows past short references to what feels like dozens of other composers. Berio cites Bach, Schoenberg, Debussy, Ravel, Strauss, Berlioz, Brahms, Berg, Hindemith, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, Globokar, Pousseur, Ives and himself, but even this may be just a start. Many are easy to spot, and are often used either illustratively or ironically. As the speaking voices that run through the movement refer to "a kind of competition on the stage, with eight female dancers", Stravinsky's Agon briefly surfaces. At other times they clash, as when a distorted phrase from Strauss's Rosenkavalier Walzes swells behind the narrative at its most uneasy. The last movement of Debussy's La Mer italicises the tension of an impassioned text heard near the end of the movement. These points of contact between words and music take place on a second-by-second basis.
But what is most impressive about this movement is that you really don't have to recognise any of these components to feel its power. As it flows on, nostalgia can suddenly transform itself, as in a dream, into nightmare, and then back again, Beckett's text and its interaction with the shifting musical surface accomplish that, with both stage-managed with magical sensitivity by Berio, who was lavishly endowed with the Italian gift for wedding music to drama.
The three-minute finale, a quiet and sinister rustling of whispered, unintelligible text and ethereal orchestral writing, is really the only thing that could follow the preceding movement, and it lasts just long enough before attenuating to nothing, hinting at the chord that began Sinfonia.
The Swingle Singers, famous for the jazz scat-singing of Bach and other composers, perform with phenomenal virtuosity here, and the orchestra under Berio is also in prime form. That premiere must have been a hell of an evening.
The remaining three pieces on the programme are so brilliantly coloured and played that listeners normally allergic to the post-WWII atonal style may find them quite approachable. The Concerto for Two Pianos is another of Berio's front-rank masterpieces, and the performance here, less abrasive than the more recent one by the GrauSchumacher duo with the Vienna Radio Symphony on Bertrand de Billy, has a unique authority. Close listening will reveal that the mysterious chord that begins and ends Sinfonia makes a discrete appearance in this concerto, too. A special harmony for Berio, perhaps?
I ordered the CD from Amazon. ArkivMusic gets the credit for bringing the music back, but they won't ship to Thailand.
