Word: sinfoniae
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...première of Italian Composer Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, New York, 1968. Popular...
...which snippets from, say, the Baroque, French Impressionism and Viennese post-Romanticism are pasted into surrealistic aural collages that would lose much of their point for anyone who had not heard LPs of the originals. Perhaps the outstanding example of that style is Berio's four-movement Sinfonia, a great critical success last fall when premiered by the New York Philharmonic (TIME, Oct. 18). This week Sinfonia comes out on a superbly engineered Columbia LP. Even though Berio conducted the premiere, he believes that the LP release will probably be a more satisfying event. From a purely esthetic point...
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...