Luciano Berio - Sinfonia for eight solo voices and orchestra

I can’t help but share the recording of the concert we sang in Baku in 2013 Conducted by Rauf Abdullayev Performed by Azerbaijan State Symphony Orchestra & Questa musica: Philipp Chizhevskiy (ensemble director; tenor 2) Mariya Grilikhes (ensemble producer; soprano 2) Ludmila Mikhailova (soprano 1) Alena Parfenova (alto 1) Natalia Gorbacheva (alto 2) Vitaly Kolachev (tenor 1) Evgeny Skurat (basso 1) Evgeny Astofurov (basso 2) First movement In the first movement of Sinfonia, Berio uses texts from Le cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked) by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The form of the piece is also inspired by Lévi-Strauss, who in his work on mythology had found that many myths were structured like musical compositions, with some myths having a “fugal“ form and others resembling a sonata. One mythical transformation however, had a structure for which he was not able to find a musical equivalent, and Berio himself said that he used this form in his Sinfonia—though Lévi-Strauss did not initially notice this. Second movement: O King In 1968, Berio completed O King, a work dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. This movement exists in two versions: one for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the other for eight voices and orchestra. The orchestral version of O King was shortly after its completion integrated into Sinfonia. It uses a fair amount of whole-tone scale motives (which also appears in the quote from The Rite of Spring in the third movement). Third movement In the third movement of Sinfonia, Berio lays the groundwork by quoting multiple excerpts from the third-movement scherzo from Mahler’s Symphony No. 2. The orchestra plays snatches of Claude Debussy’s La mer, Maurice Ravel’s La valse, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, as well as quotations from Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Johannes Brahms, Henri Pousseur, Paul Hindemith, and many others (including Berio himself) creating a dense collage, occasionally to humorous effect. When one of the reciters says “I have a present for you“, the orchestra follows immediately with the introductory chord from Don, the first movement from Pli selon pli by Pierre Boulez. The eight individual voices simultaneously recite texts from various sources, most notably the first page of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. Other text fragments include allusions to James Joyce, graffiti Berio noticed during the May 1968 protests in Paris, and notes from Berio’s diary. The quoted fragments are often chosen because they bear a rhythmic or melodic likeness to Mahler’s scherzo. Fourth movement The brief fourth movement is a return to the tonality of the second, relatively serene after the frenetic third movement. It begins again with a Mahler quotation—the chorus taken from the end of the “Resurrection“ symphony. The voices make use of various vocal effects, including whispers, syllabic fragments, and distortions of previous textual material. Fifth movement This movement was added by Berio a year later, intended to balance the first four. The movement revisits the text from the previous sections, organizing the material in a more orderly fashion to create what Berio calls “narrative substance“. Musical quotations Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, fourth movement, “Peripetie“ A brief quotation from the beginning of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 Claude Debussy’s La mer, second movement, “Jeux de vagues“ Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 , third movement Paul Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 4 Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, flute solo from the Pantomime Debussy’s “Jeux de vagues“ returns Berlioz’s idée fixe from the Symphonie fantastique Ravel’s La valse Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring Stravinsky’s Agon Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier another extract from Ravel’s La valse a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach the end of the second movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 Alban Berg’s Wozzeck Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, second movement Resumption of Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 4 Another quotation from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Boulez’s Pli selon pli, Anton Webern’s Cantata No. 2, Op. 31, fifth movement Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras