Friday, January 14, 2005
Luciano Berio Memorial: "Laborintus II" enhanced by Edoardo Sanguineti
The ANNOTICO Report

Yes, this is definitely "high brow", but the review is captivating and informative.


MUSIC REVIEW
GRIPPING, CROWD PLEASING MEMORIAL TO BERIO
Los Angeles Times
By Mark Swed
Times Staff Writer
Jan 13,  2005

[Luciano Berio's debuted his "Laborintus II," an amazing, serious, important, mind-expanding music, at Mills College in Oakland 1967, and it was chosen to highlight Berio's Memorial, who died in 2003, at Walt Disney Concert Hall conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.]...

Salonen utilizes a text by the experimental Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti, "Laborintus II" that touches on several major themes that were Berio obsessions: memory, love, death, usury. Sanguineti conflates Dante in Italian... along with original material, into a verbal stew that is as up to the minute as anything from the latest language poets.

Berio was a big personality, and there was an inherent sense of theater in nearly every bar he wrote. He assigns a speaker to declaim Sanguineti's text but also dramatically inflates it in extravagant contributions from three female vocal soloists, a small chorus and a chamber orchestra...

Everyone, whether singer or instrumentalist, has the task of making sensual, incendiary poetry ever more sensual and incendiary. The singers' role is to make the words explode off the page through arresting chirps and roars, whispers and moans. The composer here is both liberator and sonic libertine.

Salonen got ravishing, varied and outlandish sound from instrumentalists and singers...Federico Sanguineti, who has made a small career out of his alternately terrifying and disarmingly tender performances of his father's text...

"Laborintus II" made an impression; a large crowd was excitedly won over.

Berio's piece was preceded by the U.S. premieres of Salonen's small-scale wind quintet "Memoria"... derived from an early, aborted wind quintet that Salonen returned to 21 years later, in 2003. Its harmonies are rich, its sonorities dark and mellifluous. Understated, it has only a few moments of Salonen's typical playfulness...The somber chorale at the end is for Berio.

"Continuum" has nothing to do with Berio but is impressive. "Continuum" sets two poems by the Italian poet Eugenio Montale — "Crisalide" (Chrysalis) in the original Italian, "Casa sul Mare" (House by the Sea) in English translation — . Janice Felty, the soloist,  thick, fluid rendition was a curiously satisfying expression of Montale's bleak poetic images and failed explanations...

"Continuum" continues for nearly 45 minutes, and a listener must get past its sensation of restraint, of passion pushed under the rug. This is music settled on the surface, but underneath, it percolates likes crazy.

Another hearing is needed — and wanted, especially now that I know how downright ravishing the ending is...

Gripping, crowd-pleasing memorial to Berio
http://www.calendarlive.com/music/
cl-wk-newmusic13jan13,2,5694717.story?coll=
cl-music-features


Luciano Berio was born in Oneglia, Italy. After studies with Ghedini at the Milan Conservatory, he worked for the Italian Broadcasting Corporation from 1953 until 1960, when he founded the Studio di Fonologia and directed a concert series under its name. He has taught in America at Tanglewood, Mills College and Harvard University, and in Europe at Darmstadt and Dartington; from 1965 to 1971 he was a member of the composition faculty of the Juilliard School in New York. He ran the electro-acoustic department of IRCAM in Paris until 1980; in 1981 he founded tempo Reale, an institute for new music, in Florence. In 1982 he became Musical Director of the newly founded Regional Orchestra of Tuscany. In 1984 he was Artistic Director of the Maggio Musicale in Florence. In 1988 he became an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, London. He has also been awarded the prestigious Siemens Prize. Berio's compositions are performed regularly throughout the world.

John Fowler - Luciano Berio Portrait and Biography
http://www.thing.net/~grist/golpub/
fowler/berio/beriobio.htm

Edoardo Sanguineti was born in 1930 in Genova where now is teacher of Italian Litterature. He is author of many essays on Dante, Moravia, Gozzano and the editor of an anthology of Poetry of Twentieth Century, 1969. He is also a poet and novelist: among the collections of poems we can remember Laborintus, 1956; Eratopaegnia, 1960; Opus Metricum, 1960; Bookmark. Poems 1951-1981, 1982; Apocaliptical Alphabet, 1984; Without title, 1992. His novels are Italian Caprice, 1963, The goose game,1967and The Satyricon game, 1970.

Edoardo Sanguineti
http://www.librialice.it/romanzo-convforli/sanguineti.htm