Word: sinfonia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Squeezed Syllables. Sinfonia, a 28-minute work for full orchestra and eight "amplified" singers, is pure surrealism, voiced in sound. The words of its text are employed as much for their acoustic qualities as for their semantic meaning. The result is a kind of anti-opera in which verbal and musical ideas constantly dissolve into one another, yet are finally apotheosized into a grand, compelling musical sonorama...
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...
...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 attempted the same thing, but along the way they have lost the sound and the sense of music. In Berio's intensely affecting work, the music is paramount...
...Symphony No. 44 is far removed from the aloof, balanced expressiveness sought by most composers of his time; the demonic orchestral outbursts and sudden silences in the first movement of No. 80 point ahead to the struggle-locked manner of the later Beethoven. To initiate the finale of the Sinfonia Concertante, four solo instruments conduct a nonverbal argument among themselves, a passionate foreshadowing of the violent orchestral disputation in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony...