Classical Music

The piano was a constant throughout Luciano Berio’s life. Not only is there a considerable quantity of early chamber music which makes use of it, but it assumes a truly important role in any number of his works. The earliest work on this recording is the Petite Suite, written when Berio was 22 years of age. In spite of its very traditional name, the Piano Sonata is one of his last works, completed in 2001 to a commission from the Zurich Festival, but arising from an earlier, brief work called Interlinea, written in 2000 for Pierre Boulez’s 75th birthday.

Stellar Italian pianist Matteo Bevilacqua makes his Grand Piano debut with this album of Berio’s complete piano works. He is joined by Luca Trabucco in the works for piano four hands Canzonetta and Torch. 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of Berio’s death.

REVIEW:

In 2007, Andrea Lucchesini recorded most of Berio’s piano music. He had the immediate advantage of having worked on this music with Berio. What differences are there then, in how these two fine virtuosi perform Berio?

Take Sequenza IV. Lucchesini plays in a more exciting, brilliant way, and total playing time for the piece is slightly faster in his hands than Bevilacqua's. The latter’s reading, not surprisingly, is more relaxed, less flashy and more reflective. Bevilacqua also uses the third pedal, producing a sort of random hidden melody. I also prefer the recording.

The Six Encores are stylistically quite contrasted, but meld together successfully. Again, Bevilacqua takes his time. Entirely appropriately, he brings out a feeling of dreamy impressionism in three encores, for example Erdenklavier.

The Petite suite gets its first recording here. It is not really a neo-classical work. but can be thought of as Bach re-imagined through the a Prokofiev lens. The piece is often witty, vibrant, and most enjoyable. This recording may help it find a secure way into the general repertoire.

Cinque variazioni is dedicated to another Luigi Dallapiccola. Such music seems quite out of fashion nowadays, but nonetheless, this is a captivating performance. This also applies to Rounds, perhaps the most pointillistic work of the set, a sort of half-way house between Webern and Stockhausen’s Klaverierstücke.

Andrea Lucchesini premiered the Piano Sonata in 2001. Bevilacqua gives a thrilling and sparkling interpretation, but suspect he has learned a little something from Lucchesini: he enables the more dreamy qualities to come to the fore where necessary. There is a gripping drama here which holds the attention.

Two four-hand duets, Canzonetta and Touch, cap the program. They are small in duration but large in scope. Luca Trabucco is Bevilacqua’s very able partner.

Ivan Moody’s booklet notes feature a very perceptive essay and descriptions of the music.

-- MusicWeb International (Gary Higginson)

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.

BERIO: VOCI, REQUIES, CORALE

REVIEWS:
Fanfare (7-8/98, p.100) - "...The performances all seem good, as does the sound quality. There are other CDs that are more vital Berio, although this one certainly makes you think, which can't be bad these days."

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)

Prophets of the New is a series from Sony focusing on classic recordings of the 20th century's most revolutionary works.

"[Sinfonia] is a wild, four-movement work and shows the new direction music is taking. Gone are the strict constructions and parameters of serialism. Instead there is a concentration on pure sound... With the Swingle Singers grouped around microphones, breaking the language (French and English, mostly) into bits of sound components, and with the orchestra often blasting away with fortissimo chords that contained all 12 notes of the scale, there was not a dull moment anywhere... It is one of the musics of the future." -- Harold C. Schonberg, The New York Times

"...the Swingle Singers perform this music as if their lives depended on it. Sinfonia becomes a piece of musical theater on that recording..." -- Raymond Tuttle, www.classical.net