Customer Reviews

Berio: Rendering; Stanze

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Christoph Eschenbach guides this performance of Luciano Berio's intelligent and endlessly entertaining 'Rendering', his reconstitution of what Franz Schubert left as fragmental thoughts of what would have been his Symphony No. 10, with just the right amount of delicacy, lyricism and humor that makes this work sing. He manages to allow Berio's orchestration of the real Schubert lines together with the celeste introductions of Berio's links feel seamless and eloquent. For those who have not had the pleasure of hearing this work before, there are moments of magic that recall the finest of Schubert married to the sensibility that made Berio's productive output so unique. It is work that is slowly becoming a staple in the orchestral repertoire around the world. At a recent concert Gustavo Dudamel lead his Los Angeles Philharmonic in a enlightening and revelatory performance of 'Rendering', electing to place in at the beginning of a concert that included Berio's very fine 'Folk Songs' (with Dawn Upshaw as soloist) and ended with Schubert's 'Unfinished Symphony No. 8' - programming that heightened the importance of Berio's 'Rendering'. Though the accompanying work on this CD s Berio's 'Stanze', a work that needs more exposure than a single casual listening to appreciate, the highlight of this release is Eschenbach's superb performance of the 'Rendering'. Grady Harp, November 09

This Ondine disc from 2005 is of interest to fans of Luciano Berio mainly for the world premiere recording of his final composition, but it's also got one of his few pieces which can be called a crowd pleaser. That subscriber audience-friendly work is "Rendering" for (1990), a completion of Schubert's incomplete Symphony No. 10 (Schubert's great "Unfinished" was not his only unfinished). In fleshing out these fragments into a full-length work, Berio has kept mainly to Schubert's harmonic idiom, but he subtly brings it into modernity with unusual textures, strange rhythms, idiosyncratic orchestration and extended instrumental techniques. The result is a work which sways in and out of the 19th century. If you love Berio's most populist works like the "Folk Songs", you're sure to find "Rendering" an entertaining experience. I myself enjoy it, but as a fan of the composer's more rigorously modernist pieces it sometimes seems like "Berio lite". This is already the fourth recording of "Rendering", but it compares well both with at least the Chailly on a recent Decca disc and Berio's own account on Koch.

Berio finished "Stanze" for baritone, chorus and orchestra (2003) shortly before his death. It sets poems by Paul Celan, Giorgio Caproni, Edoardo Sanguinetti, Alfred Brendel and Dan Pagis. Interestingly, the first and last are Jewish poets from Bucovina who narrowly escaped perishing in the Holocaust. While I enjoy the modernist language of this piece (and its possible allusions to Lutoslawski's "Les Espaces du sommeil"), my complaint about this piece has always been the excessive thickness of the scoring once the choir comes in, which reduces so much of it to a bass-baritone sludge. Initially I thought it may be the problem of this recording, but hearing the piece live in Helsinki confirmed that this is a fault of the writing.