A programme that brings together two compositions very far from each other in time, both entitled Sonata, promises much for the imagination. The two Sonatas, for opposing reasons, were the last sonatas to be published during the lifetime of the two composers. Between them, like a bridge, is a piece permeated by the memory of water: how, then, can one give form to this intertwining? A profound ambiguity, between smiling and melancholy, inhabits the poetic world of the Sonata in G major, Op. 78, D. 894. Schubert had very clear ideas about the formal structure of the piece, thinking of a unified structure in four movements. Schubert had already seen that framework dissolve in the hands of his beloved Beethoven, who, in the two Sonatas of Op. 27, blurred the lines with regard to his scores, constructing complex, sometimes cyclical structures in which all traditional patterns disintegrate, creating a genre that is increasingly difficult to appreciate; on the other hand, with the Sonata in A minor, D. 845, Schubert had already been designated by music critics as the possible successor to such experimentation. Luciano Berio, who dedicated memorable tributes to Schubert such as Rendering (1989/90), also experimented, in the last years of his life, with the form that so obsessed Schubert: Sonata (2001) is a wonderful piece that brings both his career and his piano repertoire to a close. To explain how to approach it, we would like to pass the word to Marco Uvietta, who was able to study it's structure closely, consulting with the composer himself: Berio speaks of the Sonata as a structure made up of different blocks, which are held together by elements that act as continuous transitions. In the words of the composer: just as when traveling by train, the landscapes change, but the pylons continue to pass before our eyes, and we always look out of the same window.

From the outset, Sir Simon Rattle's conducting career has been marked by a spirit of innovation and renewal - and contemporary music in all it's facets continues to play a significant role in his work. So it was only natural that, upon taking up his post as chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, he should dedicate a concert to musica viva. The programme featured the world premiere of Vito �uraj's "Automatones" as well as Luciano Berio's "Coro". Sir Simon Rattle has conducted the latter piece several times before, but this performance marks the first recording under his baton. This is due to the unique demands that the composition places on recording technology: choir singers and orchestra musicians are positioned in pairs on the podium to overcome the visual and acoustic separation of choir and orchestra voices. This presented a particular challenge to the Bavarian Radio recording team, but they rose to it successfully, as can be heard on the new CD from BR-KLASSIK. Composed between 1975 and 1976, Luciano Berio's "Coro", for forty voices and orchestra, takes anonymous folk poems by the Sioux, the Navajo and the Zuni, as well as song texts from Polynesia, Peru, Croatia, Venice, Piedmont, Chile, and the Song of Solomon - all of them reflecting the deeply human urge for freedom - and combines them with the moving poetry of Pablo Neruda, whose death coincided with the bloody suppression of the Allende democracy in Chile by Augusto Pinochet in September 1973.

UN is the result of many hours of practice, concerts and a lot of work done, but above all it is the result of five people who, although time has passed and making five very different lives coincide with each other has become difficult, can't wait to meet up to play together, giving life to a project that connects the contemporary Italian repertoire to the American Jazz and Blues ones. Luciano Berio, through the blasts of Call, captures the attention and prepares the listener for the inexorability of the four movements of For Brass by Giuseppe Garbarino; an electric History of Mok by Alessio Manega involves and charges the audience with energy which Corrado Saglietti, with his Blues and Encore from the Any Time Brass Quintet collection, welcomes and transforms into dance, transporting the listener overseas. Who better than Duke Ellington and George Gershwin to squeeze the juice of so much passion? Summertime is just one of the themes that greet listeners with the same warmth felt by the musicians when recording them. Erika is still trying to understand if she is reading an 8 or a B on the score; Michele consolidates his career as Major with the patience that distinguishes him; Marina, extricating herself from the numerous instruments that she inexplicably plays at a level beyond human comprehension, is determined to divide Nicol� and Federico, engaged in their usual umpteenth and eternal squabble: immersed in their very well known calm and relaxed mood, the five members of the Canaja Brass Quintet have never been so proud to wish you happy listening.

The recording project "Labyrinthoi" (Labyrinths) is the result of the collaboration between saxophonist Isacco Buccoliero and composer Andrea Siano. Driven by a strong desire to explore the timbral and technical possibilities of the saxophone, the two Apulian artists work on arrangements and compositions of original pieces. Their aim is to expand the saxophone repertoire by drawing from tradition while simultaneously creating new musical forms and styles. The entire project is inspired by the imagery evoked by the labyrinth: a timeless archetype that speaks to humanity and it's inner condition within the cosmos. It reflects the perpetual search for a path that is often winding and whose completion presents itself as a daunting challenge, despite the ease with which one may have entered it. The five tracks collected here appear as five labyrinths from which, as in Spacecraft, maybe it is possible to get out only by moving upwards, in other words by overcoming all centrifugal, centripetal and gravitational forces.

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Commissioned by Marc Collet and Ensemble21, Onze Folksongs d'ici et d'ailleurs by Jean-Marie Rens is a complete rearrangement of his Sept chansons traditionnelles flamandes, francaises et wallonnes composed over twenty years ago. This new version calls for a larger instrumental ensemble, since it was rewritten for the lineup of Luciano Berio's famous Folk Songs, to which it offers an original and unprecedented mirror. The challenge here was to preserve the specific character of these Sept chansons while carrying out a massive task of orchestration-arrangement as well as composition. � Luciano Berio is arguably the most prominent figure in contemporary Italian music. He composed the cycle of Folk Songs in 1964 for his wife, the American soprano Cathy Berberian. A remarkable fusion of popular and classical music, they represent a kind of anthology made up of eleven folk songs of various origins that the composer had found on old records, in printed collections or heard directly from friends. � Albane Carrere and the Ensemble21 conducted by Marc Collet approach these two collections with infinite tenderness and a subtle art of evocation. Albane Carrere's mezzo voice weaves the link and travels imperceptibly between these two worlds.

Circles is one of Berio's most captivating, intriguing and fascinating works, a piece based on the poetry of e. e. cummings, wonderfully interpreted by the "Callas" of New Music, Cathy Berberian. The "Sequenzas" are all virtuoso solo numbers, exploring the range and agility of each performer, all the way from flutter-tonguing for the flute to slides and glissandi for the trombone. Cathy Berberian: voice / Francis Pierre: harp / Jean Pierre Drouet: percussion / Jean Claude Casadesus: percussion / Aur�le Nicolet: flute / Vinko Globokar: trombone.

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Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

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BERIO: CORO

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A solo album for clarinet inevitably becomes a test on the clarinet, on its expressive power andon the musician’s mastery in playing it. Especially if the musician plays a contemporary repertoirethat is made up of works that follow two different visions. One pays an obsessive attention to the peculiar features of the instrument, the other is apparently more indifferent to the technical limits of execution of the musical score. With his album Gian Maria Matteucci aims to unify the two visions trying to perform the score pointing out the clarinet related features. Adopting this approach of playing highlighting the role of the clarinet, in der Partitur, is for the listener an unusual and moving journey up to the spiral staircase of what the essence of the clarinet is. Let’s analyse in detail all the different stages of the experience we go through listening to Matteucci’s album “Al telaio del tempo”, where the game of implicit and explicit time, of qualitative and quantitative time, of subjective and objective time produces a large amount of moments that make it everlasting.

Katharina Ruckgaber writes: “In the UK, sales of crime novels exceed those of romantic, fantasy or science fiction titles… It seems the eagerness to hunt the killer side-by-side with the detectives and a sort of collective desire to sit rigid with fear on our sofas and be subjected to all manner of horrors has taken hold of society. However, the fascination with the depths to which human beings can descend goes back much further; indeed it is part of our “cultural heritage”, so to speak… This is happening amid – or despite – the daily menu of dramatic events served up on news programs, the barbarous events taking place around the world, events of such stark reality that they surely leave crime thriller plots in the shade. Does that mean that anyone could become a murderer? Forensic psychiatrists have been investigating this question for years and have repeatedly reached the conclusion that no one is immune to committing an act of madness when fate has dealt them a dreadful blow. That is what happens to the female narrator on my new lieder album.

"Killing one’s rival, a variation on the crime of passion committed in a conflict situation as a result of overwhelming jealousy, by losing control over one’s negative character traits shines a light on a dark power that causes her to get carried away in a highly tense moment. And now she must live with what she has done, a crime that she is unable to reconcile with her conscience, a deed that makes her feel as if an alien part of her committed it…”

Whether singing, conducting, dancing or acting, the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is a source of fascination. Alpha Classics is proud to enter her world today and to present in 2017 her very first album as singer and conductor: with the Amsterdambased orchestra Ludwig, of which she is associate artist, Barbara Hannigan has devised a programme including Berg’s Lulu Suite and Gershwin’s Girl Crazy in a Suite newly arranged by the multiaward-winning American composer Bill Elliott. To complement these two pieces, she has recorded Berio’s spectacular Sequenza III for solo voice. An outstanding soprano, a distinguished interpreter of the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, an all-round artist who creates a sensation on concert platforms and in opera houses throughout the world, Barbara Hannigan has enriched her palette over the past few years by devoting a portion of her activities to conducting. This album in the form of a musical portrait of the artist, is completed by a film made by Mathieu Amalric during the rehearsals and recording sessions. It plunges into the heart of the orchestra with a very personal look at the exchanges between conductor and musicians. Over the next few years, Alpha will accompany Barbara Hannigan in a number of projects from very varied horizons . . .

Between 1958 and 2002 Luciano Berio completed his 14 solo Sequenzas, a series of pieces that push not only each instrument's technical, textural, and expressive possibilities, but also those of the performer. Each work demands the utmost in technique, musicianship, tonal resources, theatricality, and stamina. Small wonder that the Sequenzas loom large in the active contemporary repertoire, while conservatories and competitions often assign them as test pieces. In 1998 Deutsche Grammophon brought out a three-disc set containing stunning interpretations of all 13 extant Sequenzas, plus the alto saxophone transcription of Sequenza IX for clarinet. Now Naxos enters the Sequenza playing field with equally world-class performances of the cycle, including the Cello Sequenza (No. XIV) written in 2002 (the year before Berio's death) plus the soprano saxophone version of the Oboe Sequenza (No. VII).


It might be helpful to describe some of the ways in which the DG and Naxos performances differ. In Sequenza XII for Bassoon, Pascal Gallois' rapid leaps and piercing multiphonics convey a sharper impact through DG's close microphone placement. By contrast, Naxos' more distantly miked Ken Munday sounds relatively less incisive yet fuller bodied in longer, sustained passages. DG's violist Christophe Desjardins plays Sequenza VI's cyclonic opening chordal section with lacerating intensity, whereas Naxos' Steven Dunn's slightly slower tempo allows the pitches and cross rhythms a little more room to breathe.


Naxos' Jaspar Wood does a fine job with Sequenza VIII, but DG's Jeanne-Marie Conquer's double stops boast more variety and tonal differentiation. Regarding Sequenza II, it's a toss-up between Frédérique Cambreling's pronounced dynamic contrasts (DG) and Erica Goodman's greater clarity in the scurrying, ethereal passages (Naxos). While Naxos' Tony Arnold's playful soprano makes the most of Sequenza III's madcap mood shifts, DG's Luisa Castellani's suppler voice employs wider register extremes (she was Berio's preferred singer in later years).


Had pianist Boris Berman's extraordinary marksmanship in Sequenza IV been captured in more colorful sonic splendor, his interpretation easily would hold its own next to Florent Boffard's elegant insouciance. In Sequenza X for C Trumpet Berio uses piano resonance to create continuity between phrases. On DG, Gabriele Cassone's fat, flügelhorn-like sonority and immaculate repeated-note technique have no peer, yet I like the jazziness with which Naxos' Guy Few leans into the beginnings of certain phrases. In all, this release stands as a viable alternative to the DG set, if not necessarily a replacement as we await Mode's forthcoming Sequenza cycle.
--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Includes work(s) for piano by Luciano Berio. Soloist: Andrea Lucchesini.

The passion with which both of them approached the sound of language was the basis for the long and fruitful collaboration between Edoardo Sanguineti and Luciano Berio. Sanguineti considers "Canticum novissimi testamenti" and "A-Ronne" to be the most successful musical settings of his texts. In his obituary for his friend, Sanguineti wrote in 2003: "For me he embodies purely and simply how music can be planned and thought today." "A-Ronne" begins with the biblical assertion that the word stood at the beginning of all things and concludes with the line "in my end is my music." Sanguineti could hardly have presented the composer with a better text on the subject of the transformation of the word into music. In "Canticum novissimi testamenti" Berio traces the subtle nuances and shifting moods of the poem with elegantly homogeneous sound from eight singers and eight winds.

Luciano Berio’s Coro has been described as the work that ‘exemplifies all the qualities that made him one of the leading composers of our time’. The work’s full title is ‘Coro for voices and instruments’, and the 40 voices and 44 instrumentalists do indeed make up a single choir – instrumentalists and singers sit together, with each singer paired with a particular player, and used both as soloists and combined in mass effects. Composed in 1976, Coro is also a strikingly ‘global’ work: Berio’s use of texts (mainly translations of folk poetry) attributed to peoples – ‘Peruvian’, ‘Croatian’, ‘Sioux’ – turns the work into a chorus of cultures. The texts are laid out in 31 separate sections of varying length, but the overall effect is cumulative, not episodic. The only named author is the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who became a powerful posthumous voice following his death in 1973 in the wake of General Pinochet’s military coup. Along with other text fragments, his words ‘Come and see the blood in the streets’ keep returning during the course of the work, and the sense emerges of human individuals needing to be alerted to social and political developments demanding a collective response. Under its artistic director Grete Pedersen the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir has made acclaimed recordings of music ranging from Norwegian folk songs and Hildegard of Bingen to Bach, Brahms and Xenakis. Joined by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra it now takes on one of the major choral works of the past 50 years. The album closes with Berio’s smaller scale Cries of London, performed by members of the choir.

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REVIEW:

Luciano Berio is quite rightly viewed as one of the most interesting and adventurous composers of his time. More so than many of his works from the 1960s, Coro struck me as being closer in style and spirit to some of the work of György Ligeti, particularly Ligeti at his best. It is the massed choral sound — and the astonishingly brash, almost metallic sound of the instrumental ensemble — that strikes one the most and stays in the mind. Needless to say, this is exactly the sort of work for which Bis’s SACD sonics are ideal.

– Art Music Lounge (Lynn René Bayley)