Customer Reviews

Luciano Berio: Formazioni / Folk Songs / Sinfonia

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

 

 

This recording highlights some of Berio's best pieces, and shows off the superb playing of this orchestra under Chailly, who obviously loves these scores.

The original "Sinfonia" recording from the 1960's was marvelous, but this one has the fifth movement, added later, and the entire CD is in spectacular sound. (I have not heard the Boulez version.) The beautifully played interpretation could stand on its own merits, but the fact is that Decca has given this masterwork the sonic splendor it deserves. The vocalists are Britain's outstanding Electric Phoenix, and they are at their finest in the taxing, complex middle movement that uses the "Scherzo" from Mahler's Second Symphony as its spine. Berio's transformation requires the singers to sing, yell, laugh, whisper and more, and the disciplined, yet uninhibited approach here is breathtaking.

Jard van Nes uses her warm timbre beautifully in the Folk Songs; check out her flowing line in "Black is the color of my true love's hair." Berio's spare orchestrations, coupled with freshly altered chords and rhythms, make intriguing listening. With all this, the rousing "Formazione" almost seems like a bonus.

This disc may be hard to find, but is highly recommended, both as an outstanding document of an invigorating (and major) 20th-century work, and of the chemistry between Chailly and the orchestra. One of their best recordings together.

This is a wonderful disc of Berio. True, the over-played and somewhat uneven Folk Songs are not really representative of Berio's art, but the Sinfonia is a modern classic, his most widely preformed work. Chailly's performance may irk those of us that have long lived with Boulez's performance with the New Swingle Singers. In the famous third movement, Boulez highlights the narrator which brings him to the front of the texture. The effect is quite satisfying indeed but it is not exactly what Berio intended. One need only listen to the New York performance conducted by the conductor to hear that Berio intended the narrator to be integrated in the orchestral fabric. In that sense, Chailly's performance most closely resembles Berio's own, of course, with better playing and recorded sound. Despite the fact that the music was written for the Swingle Singers, Electric Phoenix offers clearer diction than their predecessors and, because the narrator is now just only one of seven other voices, more of the total text is revealed. Chailly also offers a slightly more coherent performance of the tacked-on finale than Boulez. Eotvos's recent performance on Deutsche Grammaphon's now defunct 20/21 series is highly recommended as well, but Chailly's orchestra is just spectacular.

And yet, the best part of this disc is Formazioni, a work commissioned by the Concertgebouw in the late eighties. A through-composed piece, Formazioni is an exploration of timbres and colors typical of the composer but is filled with some many felicitous details and really delightful orchestral effects that more effectively sustains attention than Eindrucke, with its hard edged rhythms, or Continuo, with its smoother profile.

This 1990 Decca disc where Ricardo Chailly conducts the Royal Concertgeouw in three works by Luciano Berio has been overlooked even by dedicated fans of the composer. It does have some value for its recording of "Formazioni", one of the few out there of such a great piece, but the remaining two pieces are disappointingly performed.

"Sinfonia" for 8 voices and orchestra (1968-69) is vast in its proportions and in the musical traditions it incorporates. The eight voices are meant to be jazz singers, and Berio originally wrote the piece for the Swingle Singers. The first two movements are quiet and mysterious. In the first, the singers gently intone selections from Levi-Strauss' retellings of Brazilian myths, made so vague that only the phonetic properties matter. In the second movement "O King", an orchestration of an earlier independent work, the singers slowly build up to the name "Martin Luther King", who had been murdered the year in the tumultuous year when Berio wrote the bulk of the piece.

The third movement of "Sinfonia", the extroverted "In ruhig fliessender Bewegung", is the most famous. The skeleton of the work is the second movement from Mahler's "Resurrection" symphony, a little cut-up and reordered. Over this, Berio has a tenor reciting text taken mainly from Samuel Beckett's "The Unnameable" and Berio's own journalistic writings, and the orchestra responds with quotations from fifteen composers. For example, when the narrator uses the term "the lowing cattle, the rush of the stream", we hear part of Beethoven's "Pastorale" symphony, while a singer's cry "This is nothing but an academic exercise" is ironically accompanied by music by Hindemith. Every listener has his own favourite part of this movement, mine is when the narrator says "I have a present for you" and the orchestra responds with that big tutti chord that opens Boulez' "Don" (which is to say, "Gift").

The fourth and fifth movements return to a subdued tone. The fourth brings back Levi-Strauss references and is rather brief. But for all my initial passion about the third movement, I find it is the fifth which is the most intriguing and satisfying. Originally "Sinfonia" was written in four movements, but after the first performance, Berio was unhappy that these four movements were not reconciled to each other. In the fifth movement he subsequently wrote, therefore, we hear references in the form of quotation and harmonic development to the original four movements, a savage mix of voices, confused percussion, and threatening trombones a la Per Norgard's fifth symphony. A splendid end to a massive work.

For a long time, *the* recording of the "Sinfonia" to have was that with the Orchestre National de France and the New Swingle Singers conducted by Pierre Boulez (first released on Erato, then reissued at budget price in Warner's "Apex" line). But now I find the 2005 DG recording by Eotvos and the Goteborgs Symfoniker the best, for Eotvos keeps it moving along at a much fresher clip than Boulez, and keeps this 1968 piece from seeming any sort of dated hippie-era happening. Unfortunately, Chailly's is a disappointing recording. Consider the third movement. The narrator is the most important force on the stage, for it is he who seems to conjure orchestral outbursts into being. On this recording, he's mixed so low that he doesn't stand out any better than the other voices.

"Folk Songs" (1967) is a collection of artful arrangements of 11 folk songs for soprano and chamber orchestra, are probably the most frequently performed of Berio's works. They are very safe, containing no scary "modernist" traces, and they give the soprano a chance to show off. I've seen this piece performed live a couple of times, and I hate it. It's so saccharine and frou-frou. The only soprano who made it work is Cathy Berberian, for whom Berio wrote the piece, because of her incredible stage presence. There's a video recording of a performance with her that's floating around, try to track that down.

"Formazioni" (1985-1988) is only 20 minutes long, but I'd suggest Berio fans hunt down this disc just for it. (There is another recording on a recent Collegno release, but the piece was written for Chailly.) Here Berio has rearranged the orchestra to realize a wonderfully spatialized soundworld. Brass is distributed to either side, throwing notes back and forth over the rest of the orchestra. Woodwinds are also distributed at a distance from each other. The result has something of the conversational ambience of Elliott Carter, the weirdness of Stockhausen's "Gruppen" and, in its one-movement form, the coherence of Magnus Lindberg. But the writing is so recognizably Berio, from the rich post-serialist harmonies to the tremolo brass and clarinet. A merely stereo recording can't represent all of it, but the piece does sound great here. I wish I had discovered "Formazioni" years ago.

Luciano Berio was unquestionably one of the great composers of the 20th century, having had a significant influence on such forms as minimalism and avant-garde. As it is with so many of today's composers, Berio's works oftentimes require a number of run-throughs for a listener to really "get" what he was trying to get across. Once beyond that, however, and the inclination to dismiss all contemporary music as "temporary music", as George Szell was infamous for doing during his tenure at the Cleveland Orchestra, the rewards are quite significant.

Having only hear one work of Berio's before this, "Rendering" (his 1989 conception of what might have been Franz Schubert's 10th Symphony), I wasn't quite sure what to expect from the three works featured on this recording by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra and conductor Riccardo Chailly. And yet, those three works--"Formazioni"; "Folk Songs"; and "Sinfonia"--are fairly accessible overall, especially when rendered as superbly as they are by such a world-class conductor/orchestra combine. Jard van Nes functions very well in her vocal role in "Folk Songs", especially with Berio's adaptation of John Jacob Niles' Christmas ballad "I Wonder As I Wander"; and England's Electric Phoenix vocal ensemble gives a spooky gravitas to "Sinfonia", with its references to Mahler's Resurrection Symphony and the late, great Martin Luther King (it was composed the year after King's assassination). These are all fairly modern works (though "Folk Songs" and "Sinfonia" are actually creations of the 1960s); and anyone familiar with the "minimalist" works of John Adams or Steve Reich, let alone the avant-garde excursions of Krzysztof Penderecki, will find a lot of value in them, especially in performances with this orchestra/conductor combination at hand. For those of more conservative tastes, even Bruckner or Mahler (two other specialties of both Chailly and the Concertgebouw), the process might take longer. The end results, however, are quite worth it.

Christopher Culver's review says of what I wanted to say, both positive and negative. Fans of "Sinfonia," one of the most popular avant-garde works to survive into our more conventional time, should indeed seek out Peter Eotvos's energized version on DG, beside which this sober, restrained account from Chailly feels too bleak and lacking in humor (an important component in Berio's imagination). But even Eotvos drops the jazzy style that Berio intended when he wrote the eight vocal parts for the Swingle Singers. Their recording is the only one that takes Mahler uptown on the A train. In defense of the hard-to-decipher text as spoken on this CD, the Gramophone reviewer says that Berio intended the voices to be "half heard" in the musical mix. Maybe. they are amplified, after all.

Formazioni is meant to remind us of military formations, in that the orchestra is stationed in new positions, with strings forming a central core, brass on both flanks, and woodwinds scattered to create spatial effects. In idiom the piece would be hard for the casual listener (like me) to tell form Stockhausen. There are crashing clumps of dissonance for full orchestra alternating with recognizable scales, familiar harmonies, even the use of woodwinds to imitate birdsong. I don't detect theme and development, but what do I know? the work was commissioned to celebrate the Concertgebouw's 90th anniversary; Cahilly recorded it in 1988 for release in 1990. We can only thank the heyday of digital sound for the healthy economics that allowed Chailly, a child of the Boulez era, to record the modernist works by Berio, Schnittke, and Messiaen that came naturally for him.

The only total loss on this CD are the "Folk Songs" (two of them actually composed by Berio, another a transcription of an old 78 rpm shellac from Azerbaijan), the problem being Van Nes's unsuitability in the English songs and a general seriousness that makes these easy-to-hear tunes fall flat. Chailly doesn't help by being a stick of wood on the podium. Happily, there is a thoroughly delightful recent recording by Dawn Upshaw that betters even the original one from Cathy Berberian. In the end, I wind up giving the same rating as Mr.Culver, whose review will be helpful to all Breio fans.