Berio: Sinfonia (20C)

Berio: Sinfonia (20C)

Writing in July 1968 in the Christian Science Monitor, Luciano Berio recalled his late introduction to contemporary music: Thanks to Italy s political situation, it was not until 1945 that I had the opportunity to see and hear the works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Hindemith, Bartók and Milhaud. I was already 19 years old. Having discovered these composers, Berio was quick to broaden his interest in new music. He studied with Dallapiccola at Tanglewood in 1952, then went to the International Summer School at Darmstadt, where he met Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti and other composers of the postwar avant-garde. In 1955 he established an electronic music studio in Milan with Bruno Maderna, and invited Henri Pousseur and John Cage to work there. But Berio was never an easy composer to classify, and in the same 1968 article he wrote that he was very much against the formalistic and escapist attitude of twelve-tone composition in the post-Schoenberg era, fearing that a composer may end up ignoring what sound really is , adding that it is poetics which guide discovery and not procedural attitudes; it is idea, not style .<br>Sinfonia was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary, and the first performance took place on 10 October 1968, with the orchestra joined by the Swingle Singers, conducted by Berio. It was the second work on a programme that opened with Stravinsky s Agon and ended with Beethoven s Fourth Piano Concerto (both conducted by Leonard Bernstein). Writing in The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg echoed some of Berio s earlier newspaper article: It is a wild, four-movement work and shows the new direction music is taking: gone are the strict constructions and parameters of serialism. Instead there is a concentration on pure sound. In an enthusiastic notice, hailing the work as one of the musics of the future , Schonberg also commented on the audience reaction: It was encouraging to note that the audience greeted the Sinfonia with real warmth. There was none of the apathy or booing heard when strict serial music is being played. <br>At the time of this premiere, Sinfonia was in four movements, but soon Berio added a fifth as a way of demonstrating the latent unity of the preceding four parts , although he has also called it a virtual analysis of what has gone before, carried out in the language and medium of the composition itself .<br>The first movement draws on quotations from Claude Lévi-Strauss about Brazilian creation myths, while the second, O King , is a tribute to Martin Luther King, a reworking of Berio s 1967 work for voice and chamber ensemble. Central in every sense to Sinfonia is its third movement, the most elaborate, and the most contentious music in the work. It is marked In ruhig fließender Bewegung , the tempo marking of the Scherzo of Mahler s Second Symphony ( Resurrection ). The vocal text is drawn from Samuel Beckett, but it is the musical text that is the main driving force here. Berio has described the highly complex network of ideas and quotations that make up this movement as follows:<br> The piece is a tribute to Gustav Mahler (whose work sometimes seems to carry all the weight of the last two centuries of musical history) and, in particular, to the third movement of his Second Symphony ... Mahler s movement is treated as a generative and containing source, from which are derived a great number of musical figures ranging from Bach to Schoenberg, Beethoven to Stravinsky, Berg to Webern, Boulez, Pousseur, myself and others. The various musical characters, constantly integrated in the flow of Mahler s discourse, are combined together and transformed as they go. In this way, these familiar objects and faces, set in new perspective, context and light, unexpectedly take on a new meaning. <br>Berio expla