Berio - Sinfonia (1969) with score

Composed in 1968–69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, Sinfonia is an innovative post-serial classical work, with multiple vocalists commenting about musical (and other) topics as the piece twists and turns through a seemingly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The eight voices are not used in a traditional classical way; they frequently do not sing at all, but speak, whisper and shout words by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose Le cru et le cuit provides much of the text, excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings. The work is in five movements: 1. [untitled] 2. O King 3. In ruhig fliessender Bewegung 4. [untitled] 5. [untitled] The first movement primarily uses a French text source and the third movement primarily uses English text sources. The text for the second movement is limited to the phonemes of the title, “O Martin Luther King.“ The remaining movements are