Rendering (1988-89) 	32:36 	 
after fragments for Symphony No.10 in D major, D 936A by Franz Schubert
1. I 	Allegro - Molto lontano, non 'cantare'! 	9:44 		
2. II 	Andante - Lontano - Immobile e lontanissimo - 	10:53 		
3. III 	Lontano (lo stresso tempo) - Lontano, assente - 	11:51 		

Sonata, Op.120 No.1 (1986)	23:55 	 
Clarinet Sonata No. 1 by Johannes Brahms adapted for Clarinet and Orchestra
4. I 	Allegro appassionato - Sostenuto ed espressivo 	8:25 		
5. II 	Andante un poco adagio 	6:06 		
6. III 	Allegretto grazioso 	4:09 		
7. IV 	Vivace 	5:06 		

Sechs frühe Lieder (1987)	16:40 	 
from Lieder und Gesange 'aus der Jugendzeit' by Gustav Mahler 	 
8. 1 	Hans und Grete (Book I No.3). 	2:39 		
9. 2 	Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Walk (Book II No.2). 	4:07 		
10. 3 	Frühlingsmorgen (Book I No.1). Gemächlich, leicht bewegt 	1:47 		
11. 4 	Phantasie (Book I No.5). Träumerisch - 	2:25 		
12. 5 	Scheiden und Meiden (Book III No.3). 	2:16 		
13 .6 	Erinnerung (Book I No.2). Langsam und sehnsüchtig - 	3:10 	

Michael Collins – clarinet
Roderick Williams – baritone
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra
Edward Gardner – conductor

Berio had an abiding fascination with reconciling the past and the present, which can be seen in his orchestral realisations of works by Mahler and Brahms, and most notably, in Rendering (1990), his typically creative completion of unfinished symphonic sketches by Schubert.

In Rendering, Berio – in his own words – sets himself the target of ‘following those modern restoration criteria that aim at reviving the old colours without, however, trying to disguise the damage that time has caused, often leaving inevitable empty patches in the composition’. In the ‘restoration’, Schubert’s sketches have been beautifully orchestrated in period style, and the ‘empty patches’ have been filled with music composed by Berio himself, in his own voice – thereby successfully combining the musical worlds of the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries into one convincing whole.

The Clarinet Sonata by Brahms embodies the composer’s taut and concentrated compositional style. In transcribing the work, Berio felt that, when experienced in the less intimate surroundings of today’s concert halls, the extreme compression of Brahms’s late chamber music style was in need of some additional support, and his version, recorded here, includes a fourteen-bar orchestral introduction to the first movement, leading into Brahms’s own, much shorter opening phrase, as well as five additional bars at the beginning of the second movement.

Berio completed his orchestration of six early songs by Gustav Mahler in 1987, and conducted the first performance with the Toscanini Orchestra on 7 December that year, with Thomas Hampson the baritone soloist. The six songs in this orchestrated set are ‘Hans und Grete’, ‘Phantasie’, ‘Scheiden und Meiden’, ‘Erinnerung’, ‘Frühlingsmorgen’, and ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’.

The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Edward Gardner, with Roderick Williams the baritone soloist in the songs by Mahler and Michael Collins the soloist in Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata. --- theclassicalshop.net

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For 40 voices and instruments:
- 01. I "Today is mine"-"Wake up woman rise up woman" 4:35
- 02. II "Venid a ver" 1:42
- 03. III "Your eyes are red" - IV. "Venid a ver" - V. "Your eyes are red"/"Stand up" 1:58
- 04. VI "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" - VII "Wake up woman rise up woman" 1:59
- 05. VIII "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" 4:36
- 06. IX "I have made a song" - X. "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" - XI.
  "I have made a song" 3:52     play
- 07. XII "Venid A Ver La Sangre" - XIII. "Wake Up Woman Rise Up Woman" - XIV.
  "Venid A Ver La Sangre" 2:55
- 08. XV "Komm in meine Nähe" - XVI. "Today is mine" 2:32
- 09. XVII "Pousse L'Herbe E Fleurit La Fleur" - XVIII. "Go My Strong Charm/Venid A Ver" - XIX.
  "It Is So Nice"
 - Xx. "Your Eyes Are Red/El Día Palido S Asoma" 5:14
- 10. XXI"Mirad mi casa muerta" 3:31
- 11. XXII"Je m'en vais où ma pensée s'en va" 1:48
- 12. XXIII "Pousse L'Herbe Et Fleurit La Fleur" - XXIV. Oh Issa/Ich Sehe Tautropfen/
  Komm In Meine Nähe/Your~Eye 2:54
- 13. XXV "Oh Isselo In Alto/Komm In Meine Nähe" - "XXVI. "Come Ascend The Ladder" - XXVII.
  "When We Came To This World" 3:34  play
- 14. XXVIII "El Diá Oscila Rodeado" - XXIX. "Hinach Yafà Raayatí" 5:52
- 15. XXX "El diá palido se asoma" 4:44
- 16. XXXI "Spin colours spin/El diá palido se asoma" 5:06

Kölner Rundfunkchor, 
Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, 
Luciano Berio – conductor

Recorded in 1979 and originally released in 1980

It was in Coro - first performed in 1977, but which had been gestating for most of the previous decade - that Berio put his belief in the power of folk music most stringently and ambitiously to the test. At 50 minutes, it's the longest of all his works for the concert hall, combining a chorus of 40 voices with an orchestra of the same size. But the two groups are never treated as separate sound blocks to be juxtaposed or pitted against each other in conventional choral-music fashion: instrumentalists and singers sit together, with each voice paired with a particular instrument, and used both as soloists and combined in mass effects.

>The text, which Berio compiled himself, is a multilingual patchwork drawn from folk songs from around the world - the first is from the Sioux tribe of north America, the second from Peru, the third from Polynesia - while a line from Pablo Neruda's long poem Residencia en la Tierra ("Come, see the blood in the streets") acts as a refrain, binding the collage together. Though there are 29 separate "songs" in Coro, the effect is of a continuous, sustained piece, with solo voices and instruments emerging to create new musical contexts and then slipping back into the sound continuum as the textures evolve and overlap. It is music that is in continuous flux, and though there are very few direct musical quotations from the folk sources (Berio does include some quotations from other works of his own), the techniques of those different musics are absorbed directly into Berio's own, constantly colouring and articulating it. – Guardian2005

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1-14. La Vera Storia

Alexandrina Milcheva (mezzo-sopran)
Mariana Nicolesco (soprano)
Oslavio Di Credico (tenor)
Roelof Oostwoud (tenor)
Alberto Noli (baritone)
Giancarlo Luccardi (bass)

Orchestra e Coro della Scala
New Swingle Singers
Luciano Berio - conductor

Milano, Teatro alla Scala, 9 marzo 1982

Opera Yes, Opera No

To say what happens in La vera storia is not easy, and I don’t know that it’s all that useful, granted that this is a work which tells its own story. In fact, I’ve always thought of La vera storia as a work of musical theatre whose general thrust must be grasped at first contact, just as you understand a book when you read it for the first time (provided you know something about the author), or listen to a story being told (provided you know something about the person telling or singing the story). If I weren’t afraid of being misunderstood or appearing rude, I wouldn’t even have written these lines.

La vera storia is in two parts. In Part I, a series of events are set out in summary fashion: they establish a paradigm of elementary conflicts, expressed and represented with the familiar resources of a theatre where things are narrated through song: arias, duets, choruses etc. The text of Part II is identical to that of Part I, but it is distributed and segmented in a different way. So Part II offers a transfiguration, and in some respects an analysis of that paradigm of elementary conflicts by placing it in a substantially different musical and dramaturgical perspective. Part I is an opera (though instead of ‘recitatives’ there are ballads), Part II is not. Parts I and II set out the same thing in different ways, as if two ballad singers each offered their own version of the same event, each giving a different function to the same narrative structure. You might think of either Part as being a varied ‘ritornello’ - or even a parody- in relation to the other. However much Part I inclines towards the images and scansions of a folk tale, Part II tends instead to narrate nothing any more: it thinks about Part I. In Part I, made up of closed numbers, stage action predominates; in Part II musical action predominates. In Part I there are protagonists, in Part II only their echo remains. In Part I there are vocal characters (baritone voice, soprano voice, ballad singer, etc.), in Part II there is a vocal collectivity. Part I is real and concrete, Part II is dreamt. Part I embraces the opera house stage, Part II rejects it. Part I is ‘horizontal’, Part II is ‘vertical’. Part I implies summer, and the open air; Part II winter in the city. And so on.

But where then is the true story: in the first or the second part? I don’t know. Anyone watching and listening might glimpse the outlines of a virtual Part III that is perhaps more true than either, maybe like those towns and gardens of Calvino’s whose terraces look out “only over the lake of our mind”.

The origins of La vera storia lie deep in my own personal story, which has involved many encounters with popular music (Quattro canzoni popolari, Folk Songs, Questo vuol dire che…, Coro, Il ritorno degli Snovidenia), but also the need to discover further functions implicit within an established musical proposition (Chemins I-V and Corale). La vera storia is to some extent the synthesis of these two preoccupations of mine which, combined, lead me to search out a musical and dramaturgical space that is open but not empty, a space that can be inhabited by figures and protagonists who are entirely concrete, but changeable: a space that is not inhabited by phantom characters imprisoned in a libretto. ---Luciano Berio (author's note), lucianoberio.org

download (mp3 @320 kbs):

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1. The modification and instrumentation of a famous hornpipe as a merry and altogether sincere homage
 to uncle Alfred, da H. Purcell	1:03
2. Contrapunctus XIX (Die Kunst der Fugue) di J.S. Bach	8:34
3. Quattro versioni originali della "Ritirata notturna di Madrid" di L. Boccherini sovrapposte e trascritte
 per orchestra	6:28
4. Variazioni sull'aria di Papageno "Ein Madchen oder Weibchen" (Divertimento per Mozart)	2:34       play
5. Rendering per orchestra, da F. Schubert (1. Allegro)	9:47
6. Rendering per orchestra, da F. Schubert (2. Andante)	11:06
7. Rendering per orchestra, da F. Schubert (3. Allegro)	11:53	
8. Sonata in fa minore op. 120 n. 1 per clarinetto e orchestra, da J. Brahms (1. Allegro appassionato)7:49
9. Sonata in fa minore op. 120 n. 1 per clarinetto e orchestra, da J. Brahms (2. Andante un poco adagio)5:27
10. Sonata in fa minore op. 120 n. 1 per clarinetto e orchestra, da J. Brahms (3. Allegretto grazioso)4:18 play
11. Sonata in fa minore op. 120 n. 1 per clarinetto e orchestra, da J. Brahms (4. Vivace)	5:14

Giuseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra of Milan
Riccardo Chailly – conductor

Luciano Berio made an art of transcritption, attracted as he was to traditional music, both folk and classical, while being wedded to a modernist idiom. He picks up where Schoenberg left off in his famous transcription of the Brahms first pinao quartet, which in Schoenberg's hands was expanded into the "Brahms Fifth."

Like his predecessor, Berio is fascinated by the unlimited potential of orchestration, and his addition of a multi-color palette to Purcell and Bach is affectionate; a Boccherini slow march gets turned into a full street procession with a brass band. Papageno's second aria gets deconstructed a la Webern, veyr wittily, almost completely disguising the original melody. The two main works here are, first, "Rendering," Berio's completion of Schubert's sketches for a Tenth Symphony, which are so fragmentary that he has plenty of room for modernist intervention, as he did with the Mahelr Second in Sinfonia. Berio's dreamy interludes are highly effecitve;; this is like a dozing visitation by Schubert's distrubed ghost. It's by far the most we will ever get out of the bits and pieces, in themselves not inspiring, that the composer left behind.

The other major item here is an orchestral transcription of a late Brahms sonata for either viola or clarinet, transformed by Berio into a surprisingly moving clarinet concerto. The solo line remains faithful to the original, while the orchestral part is emotionally amplified, in the mode of Schoenberg's treatment of the piano quartet, very lush and highly colored. In all, this is exemplary creative use of previous musical materials, a tribute to each composer rather than a hijacking. Chailly and his new Italian orchestra perform everything very well, if a bit tamely, and Decca's sound is impeccable. If only the cover weren't so extremely drab. It misrepresents the high spirits of what's inside.

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1 .Side One
2. Side Two

The Swingle Singers
New York Philharmonic
Luciano Berio – conductor

This is the definitive performance of this piece, Berio's masterpiece, conducted by the composer, with the original Swingle Singers doing a phenomenal job in a most challenging set of parts, as conceived and written for them.

The competition is thin. The Eotvos is okay, but nothing special. The Boulez is dreadful, one of his worst recorded performances. He simply has no gut-level feel for this music, for its flambouyant theatricality, and the recording is poorly balanced and almost inaudible in places--especially in the centerpiece, the extraordinary Mahler/Beckett-trope movement. Berio conducted his own masterpiece brilliantly. So why hasn't Columbia/Sony ever released this magnificent recording digitally?

Undoubtedly because it's only the 4-movement version; they may even be forbidden from releasing it by Berio's estate. This is actually one of the virtues of the 1968 recording, however, as the 5th is by far the weakest movement of the Sinfonia. It's the only one that sounds like boilerplate "contemporary music"; its supposed culminating role, as quoting from and tying up all the strands of the other 4, simply doesn't work very well.

Or perhaps this movement is better than I think, but the only existing recordings (Boulez and Eotvos) have made a really bad case for it. Come to think of it, Berio rehearsed and conducted the Sinfonia in Tanglewood, when? in the late 70s/early 80s? It must have been the 5-movement version, and it was another brilliant performance. Did that performance get recorded? Are there bootlegs floating around? At any rate, this 1968 vinyl is still the best version of this amazing piece, without any question at all, and should be treasured by everyone who owns it--at least until you can find a digital transfer. Anyone who doesn't yet own it and still has a turntable, snap it up. If the only version you know of the Sinfonia is the Eotvos (or, heaven help you, the Boulez), you're in for a treat! ---C. Smith, amazon.com

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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 -                 play
6. Eindruke

Orchestre National de France, 
Pierre Boulez - conductor
Swingle Singers
Ward Swingle – conductor

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

Luciano Berio was commissioned to write a work for the New York Philharmonic's 150th anniversary. What resulted was the Sinfonia, a masterpiece of the twentieth century musical movement. This work combines many of the Italian composers fascinations - from Mahler to Martin Luther King - and sympathizes them. The result is fascinating, stimulating, and thoroughly enjoyable. Boulez's interpretation is really top-notch. He leads the orchestra with great power, gusto, and energy. This vision is evident, especially in the third moment of the piece. Berio here takes the Scherzo from Mahler's second symphony and "pastes" in other famous musical phrases from Debussy, Ravel, Beethoven, Schoenberg and others as well as adding voices, which sustain a dialog throughout the entire movement. Boulez's intellectual approach to music is appreciated here - the result is a crisp, definitive reading of this powerful twentieth century masterpiece. --Prescott Cunningham Moore

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