Customer Reviews

Luciano Berio: Coro

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Berio is undoubtably one of the most brilliant composers of his generation in Europe. Schooled at Darmstadt in the high serialist manner and possessed of a wide ranging intellect and knowledge of culture, Berio never stayed comfortably in any one post-serialist niche. He is by turns a brilliant electronic composer, lyrical writer for the voice, and as experimental as anyone in the last 50 years. But even for all of his wide ranging interests (or perhaps because of them) I have always found him to be an uneven composer. At his best he is at least the rival and maybe the superior of Ligeti, but he does have his share of substandard and downright boring work. The present CD falls squarely in the brilliant category.

Coro is written for choir and small orchestra. However the arrangement of the musicians is unique and extremely effective. Each of the 40 voices of the choir is paired with one of 40 instruments and spread throughout the playing area. As such, the mass of sound is much more complex than the small forces might lead you to expect. The sound is alternatively massive and transparent in almost a chamber sort of way. The texts set are engligh translations of tribal and folk poetry alternated with a poem by Pablo Neruda. Musically, Berio continues his exploration of folk music, begun in his marvelous Folk Songs cycles, but this time he weds the melos of folk music (with a few exceptions, he never actually quotes material, just procedures) with the complex collage techniques that he developed in the 60s with works like Laborynthus II and most brilliantly in the Sinfonia. The result is a dense, lyrical collage of cultures and musical styles, all kept integrated by Berio's phenomenal ear for sonority and Italianate sense of lyricism.

The vocal writing is especially wonderful in this work. The piece begins with a solo for soprano and piano so intimate that I initially thought that something was wrong and I'd bought an art song recital rather than a choral and orchestra piece. Soon though the work gains in voices and then in instruments with strands of melody appearing and disappearing with amazing facility. The work has the same "river of culture" sort of feel that the third movement of the Sinfonia had, but with less obvious devices and a more folk-tribal feel.

The performance on this disc is gorgeous. The disc is full and very present in the more chamber sections but gains beautifully in the loudest full orchestra sections. This range of dynamic is extremely difficult to pull off and actually eludes DG and Columbia in their renditions of the Sinfonia. And the singing is terrific.

This piece is one of Berio's masterpieces I believe. I like it even better than the Sinfonia (which, though brilliant, I think begins to sound dated now.). In many ways, Coro can be thought of as a bridge between the very literal way in which Berio treats folk songs in the vocal cycle and the brilliant treatments he gives Sicilean music in his marvelous Voci. But the work is a tou de force on it's own. If Berio had written nothing but this, he would be a significant composer indeed. Treat yourself to this piece.

Berio characterized CORO as a "plan for an imaginary city." He also called it "a substantially epic and and narrative structure made up mostly of self-contained and often contrasting episodes." As the title indicates, CORO is a powerful vocal work, but in addition to the 40 voices of the Cologne Radio Chorus, it also utilizes the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, and each singer is paired with an instrument throughout. This modern masterpiece resembles works by Nono and Xenakis, as a point of reference, and not only in the music but in the content as well.

Berio has not been known for his political engagement, in contrast to Nono, but CORO centers on a fragment of Neruda's poetry, the line: "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles," or "Come and see the blood in the streets." The import is less clear than in Nono's explicitly revolutionary work, but why choose Neruda, a man of the left, if not to make a point? The work was written from 1975 to 1977, shortly after Pinochet's bloody U.S.-backed coup in Chile, and first recorded in 1980. This is that recording, with Berio himself conducting, reissued in DG's 20/21 Echo series (there is at least one other recording, on Col Legno.

Berio weaves folk narratives throughout the piece, punctuated by the line from Neruda, from his Residencia en la Tierra (1933-47). He utilizes texts from the Sioux and Navajo, Peru, Polynesia, Gabon, Venice and Sicily, Hebrew, and others. While sung in German, the excellent booklet, with notes by both Berio and Paul Griffiths, includes all the lyrics in English. As Griffiths points out, "These folk utterances...are expressed in short pregnant phrases and speak of a oneness between man and nature, of a life ordered by ritual, of love and death accepted without qualm or confusion."

For anyone with ears open to the sounds of modern music, CORO is not to be missed. Along with Nono's COMO UNA OLA DE FUERZA Y LUZ, for Soprano, Piano, Orchestra & Magnetic Tape (1971-72), it is a masterpiece of the 20th century.

Luciano Berio's "Coro" for 40 voices and 40 instruments (1975-77) is one of the Italian composer's most successful postmodernist efforts, blending all manner of musical references into a single, hour-long piece. Each of the 40 voices is paired with an instrument from the ensemble, distributing the sonorities through the performance space in an original way.

The form of the piece is a series of myriad song settings, folk music references and post-serialist lines. The complex piano runs and unstable, flutter-tongued brass that is Berio's distinctive style sit alongside traditional tonal songs without any sense of incongruity, an impressive achievement. From time to time, the music returns to a piercing tone cluster to which is set Neruda's line "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" (Come and see the blood running through the streets). The first half of "Coro" has the thickest textures and loudest dynamics, while the second half is less dense. If you like "Sinfonia", then you'll find "Coro" another example of Berio at his best in combining vastly different musical styles into a coherent work.

This 1970s recording where Berio himself leads the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir is a classic one, but after reissuing it twice, Deutsche Grammophon has now allowed it to fall out of print again. At least in Europe (I'm not sure about North America), the recording has been reissued at budget price by Brilliant Classics.

I recognize that opinion is still somewhat divided over Berio's large-scale Coro for choir and orchestra. It is certainly one of his more difficult works, and the impenetrability is further amplified by the fact that the work relies a lot on using the physical space of the performance (the movement of the sound around the stage and the differentiating of textures based on subtle shifts in physical location of the various layers) - something that is rather hard to capture on disc (maybe a super-audio option would have helped). Apart from that, this is an hour's worth (continuous) of dense, concentrated, darkly desolate music; the work as a whole consists of a single, massive, intense mood of, in Berio's own words, `dark suspension'.

So it is certainly challenging music, certainly not as surface level enjoyable as his famous Sinfonia, and Berio does not hesitate to put demands on listeners' concentration (that does not mean that the work is not communicative, however). If that sounds off-putting I guess Coro will not be the work for you. But you would most certainly miss out on one of the great masterpieces of the second half of the twentieth century. Coro is scored for forty voices and forty instruments and based on writings of Pablo Neruda, interspersed with material from various places around the world - both textual and musical. Indeed, Berio's love for folk music is certainly a major source of inspiration - but it is the, well, almost acerbic, unrefined and intense sound of folk music.

Thus Coro is in many ways a multi-layered collage of inspirations, but it is certainly a unified, coherent whole - if I were to go clichéd (and overly simplistic) I might say something along the lines of the work being a symbol of mulitculturalism, where the various voices work wonderfully together in a closely argued unified whole without losing their individual identities. Generally the instruments and voices are used in smaller groups (single voices combined with single instruments), making up the many layers of this complicated but truly rewarding and remarkable masterpiece. The performances are, as far as I can tell, superb and the recording, well, as good as one could realistically hope for from a traditional stereo disc in which much of the effect of the spatial separation of the performance groups are inevitably lost. Still, this disc is something of a must - Coro is, again, a major masterpiece, if not an easy one, which anyone interested in 20th century music would want to know. There are alternative recordings out there, and I do not know how they compare with this one - I cannot imagine that the problems with recording this work are more effectively solved, however, and I can hardly imagine the performances themselves much improved upon.