Track Listing

1. Sinfonia For eight Voices And Orchestra: I -
2. Sinfonia For eight Voices And Orchestra: II - O King
3. Sinfonia For eight Voices And Orchestra: III - In ruhig fliessender Bewegung
4. Sinfonia For eight Voices And Orchestra: IV -
5. Sinfonia For eight Voices And Orchestra: V -
6. Eindruke

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #157349 in Music
• Released on: 1992-04-28
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
Berio's most celebrated opus is what a friend describes as a "kitchen-sink work:" the Italian composer, in a display of exuberance and virtuosity, seems to have synthesized all of his disparate preoccupations and fascinations--Samuel Beckett, Martin Luther King, Mahler, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss--into an intensely personal orchestral fantasia. The result, which the composer describes as "perhaps my most experimental work," is ultimately joyous. Pierre Boulez conducts. --Joshua Cody

Customer Reviews

Berio's masterpiece and another fine work, but get the budget reissue, and supplement it with Eotvos
This disc of two Luciano Berio works in performance by the Orchestre National de France and Pierre Boulez was originally released on Erato in 1986, and it is this version which this Amazon listing describes. However, Warner Classics reissued it at budget price in 2001 in their "Apex" line, a bargain which the contemporary music afficionado should seek out. As you shall see, I do not think this disc has the best performance of a key Berio work, but nonetheless it has much to recommend itself.

"Sinfonia" for eight voices and orchestra (1968-69) is one of Luciano Berio's greatest works, vast in its proportions and in the musical traditions it incorporates. The eight voices are meant to be jazz singers, and Berio wrote the piece for the Swingle Singers, who appear here in a later lineup. 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 before.

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 Unnamable" 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, this was *the* recording of the "Sinfonia" to have. However, I must say I find it superseded by that on Deutsche Grammophon in the "20/21" series, where Peter Eotvos leads the Goteborgs Symfoniker. In the third movement, Eotvos keeps it going at a very nice clip, creating a dizzying parade of images. Boulez, on the other hand, keeps things quite slow; if one has already heard the Eotvos recording, terms like "molasses" come to mind. Also, Ward Swingle's narration, while it might have worked for Berio in forty years ago, now makes this sound like a dated '60s happening, and the Eotvos performance Nonetheless, Boulez's handling of the other four movements is quite fine, and I certainly invite Berio fans to get this.

The liner notes for "Sinfonia" consist only of Luciano Berio's own programme note, which covers all the basics. However, those enraptured by the piece would do well to seek out David Osmond-Smith's PLAYING ON WORDS: A Guide to Luciano Berio's 'Sinfonia' (University of Chicago, 1987) ISBN 0947854002.

Even if the performance of "Sinfonia" is not my favourite, the following "Eindrucke" for orchestra (1973-74) is very entertaining. Where does one go after one has reconciled himself to the whole classical tradition, giving birth to the first postmodern symphony? Evidentally back to modernism, but of a fresh new type. "Eindrucke" is a quintessential 1970s Berio piece, interested in organically generating material from strict processes, while still remaining dramatic and easily accessible..

I should add that this is an IRCAM recording, meaning that these two works appear in crystal-clear sound. Bottom line: get the Eotvos recording and this, and enjoy a thrilling tour de force of the 20th-century music.

Boulez NOT against bernstein
Boulez's recording of "Sinfonia" is fascinating in that it creates a revisionist view of Berio as a far "cooler" composer than he was. Granted, the complicated score works on that level, and the reserve with which Boulez interprets lends an organicism to the work's slow movements, and a direction to the first.

Just a word of correction to other reviewers: the original LP, which is quite outstanding, has Berio conducting, not Bernstein, and it lacks the fifth movement, which gives it an almost elegiac quality. What's more, while--through Boulez's championing and elsewhere--Berio has been viewed as a rather "formal" or cerebral composer, his original recording is, if anything, remarkably romantic. It's interesting to see how the London recording (rather cool, crystalline--even more reserved than Boulez) and the Boulez contrast with the Berio and, to a lesser extent, the fine Chailly recording in their attitudes towards the third movement's "Mahlerian" text. A conductor's attitude towards Mahler (ironic, detached, involved, "romantic") goes a long way towards showing what kind of message their Sinfonia will give.

The Sinfonia was constructed with more than a little doubleness in mind, and, to that extent, the Boulez is a valuable, ostensibly dispassionate essay on all Berio's worldview circa '68. Two interesting counterpoints: Boulez took over for Bernstein at the NYPhil in '69. Also, while writing the Sinfonia, Berio wrote a widely circulated (christian science monitor) critique of the twelve-tone establishment, although he quotes Boulez during Sinfonia. Boulez's championing of Berio suggests that ideological lines are not nearly as solid as we might at first presume.

music lost in time's longevity
I don't know; Berio's music doesn't seem to have a longevity factor, and he is to blame for like Stockhausen he did pounce,manipulate on whatever was the latest cultural expressive "buzz" of the time, like here in 'Sinfonia' utilizing the Swingle Singers,and the gestures,scat singing, in hip dip self-conscious dialogue, like I'm here you know it now, thanking (in this recording) Mr. Boulez for conducting,or ". . . shall I recite now, I think I will say my poem. . . "and Sixties Rebellions graffiti,or the wrongheadedness of dropping texts of Beckett here is horrible, and I don't think Beckett would have approved of his chiseled-like texts being used as fodder for this self-conscious COOLNESS projected here.The sustained timbres,quiet reflective dedication to Martin Luther King,"O King" was the one and only serious musical work of this period to this greatest of American leaders.And this movement is frequently played by itself, But Berio was not one drawn to politics,and had words with those who did as the late Hanns Eisler and Luigi Nono.But even Berio's operas inhabit a safe complaisant "time lost" the same collecting all the iconic buzzes of the 20th Century,as in"A King in Waiting" from acrobats, to femme fatales,live ravens to lost befuddled directors, ( a la Fellini 'Otto e Mezzo'),music about itself,not really looking outward,to cross borders with text and timbre. "Sinfonia" is really onl;y know for one movement, like the avant-garde's "hook",where all the quotes appear,"In ruhig fliessender Bewegung" like Debussy's "La Mer", Ravel, R.Strauss,"Der Rosenkaviler" and Mahler's St'Anthony,"second symphony" he was working in Palermo at the Catania Library that had seldom seen these modern scores.
When I first heard "Sinfonia" I was struck I said "is this the path to the future after the Beatles",this crosfertilization of the avant-garde and popular culture?Back then we thought culture in the West as cinema was transformative; well we are here now, and all paths have lead no where. In fact all we have now are composers who want to be loved, obsessed with popular culture,or themselves and the "buzz", So I guess Berio saw something profound in the late Sixties. But all paradigms have changed and "Sinfonia" possibly rings true in a museum, like a document and that which was.
Luciano is an incredible orchestrator however, coming from the one-dimensional culture of Fascist Italy the cultural freeze, where he learned incredibly quickly as his late Fifties "Epihanies" for female vocalist and orchestra attests.Berio it seems always chose the shortest distance between two points in the creative compositional implications within the post-war generation, opposite let us say Luigi Nono who at the end of his life started at the beginning again with a renewal of timbral,acoustic/live electronics and spatial interests in music, this while Berio's aesthetic grew more one-dimensional simplified and predictable. Boulez does bring some nice wonderful clarity to this complex score certainly more than Bernstein who hadn't a clue on the post-war avant-garde and the nuances and subtleties of modern orchestrations.