Word: berio
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...past, Hector Berlioz was perhaps the first to pay much attention to the symphonic battery of drums. Later on, Stravinsky and Bartok proved that percussionists could do more interesting things than simply thump out a basic rhythm. Nowadays such avant-gardists as Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Luciano Berio and Karl-heinz Stockhausen treat the percussionist as a performer with rights (and responsibilities) equal to any other soloist...
...likelihood, that will not be the fate of Luciano Berio. Last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, Berio led the New York Philharmonic and the Swingle Singers in the world premiere of his Sinfonia. It is a white-hot musical experience that invokes the malaise of the times better than all the sit-ins, beards, beads and clubbings that wrench contemporary life...
...scribbled on the walls of the Sorbonne during last May's student insurrection. All the while, the orchestra plays a convoluted version of the third movement from Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony, as snippets of Debussy, Bach, Stravinsky and a dozen other composers float in and out of Berio's nightmarish stream of semiconsciousness. In one sense, the words do not matter; Berio is not interested in making a song. He is communicating a kind of life attitude that shrinks at the prospect of some unnamable terror. It is a musical collage of headlines persistently giving a warning...
Columns of Sound. Along with that utterance goes Berio's prodigious orchestral writing. Sinfonia contains some of the most novel rhythms and chords since Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Great columns of dissonant, atonal sound seem to rise up with a towering permanence that belies the fact that the sound is composed of constantly moving parts. Often the music has a complexity that is normally achieved only with electronic synthesizers. At other times, it has the air of unexpectedness that is characteristic of chance, or aleatory, writing. Yet Berio employs neither electronics nor chance. Sinfonia is essentially...
This is what Berio, 42, has been driving at in all his work. To him, what counts is man's civilized conscience. His best previous theatrical works-Laborintus, Circles, Passaggio-were promising examples of music as a "social act." At first, he explored opera, since it seemed to him that it offered the best form for social comment. Now he has no use for it. "As a musico-dramatic form, opera is completely useless," he says. In Sinfonia, Berio suggests a new kind of dramaturgy encompassing music, drama, word sounds and, eventually, lighting and stage effects. Other composers have...