[sonicabal] Berio obituaries

See http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2003-05-27-berio_x.htm and
also from the NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/28/obituaries/28BERI.html

May 28, 2003

Luciano Berio, 77, Composer of Mind and Heart, Dies

By PAUL GRIFFITHS

Luciano Berio, an Italian composer whose many compositions, ranging from
chamber music to large-scale orchestral works and from operas to songs,
combined innovative imagination and analytical depth with a richly
sensuous feeling for sound and form, died yesterday in Rome. He was 77.

An outstanding orchestral and vocal composer who was perhaps most
remarked upon for his works with solo voice, he was especially known
during his long residence in New York City for conducting his own works
with the Juilliard Ensemble, which he founded. 

Mr. Berio's love for music was exuberantly promiscuous, and it drew him
close to Italian opera (especially Monteverdi and Verdi), 20th-century
modernism (especially Stravinsky), popular music (the Beatles, jazz), the
great Romantic symphonists (Schubert, Brahms, Mahler) and folk songs from
around the world. All gave him models for original compositions or
arrangements, or for works that were neither entirely new nor entirely
old, works in which threads of the old could be combined with new
strands. An outstanding example is the middle movement of his "Sinfonia"
for orchestra and vocal octet (1968-9), where the entire scherzo from
Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony rolls along, supporting a tapestry of
short quotations, new ideas and spoken interjections. Even when his music
is ostensibly original it conveys a homage to the past. For him to write
an opera, a concerto, a string quartet or a piece for solo clarinet was
to contribute to a tradition. That did not mean following traditional
forms, which would have been far from his thinking. Rather, the piece
would emerge and develop as if it were a memory, evoking textures and
situations from the past.

Mr. Berio was born on Oct. 24, 1925, into a musical family long resident
in the Ligurian coastal town of Oneglia. His grandfather was his first
teacher, and he grew up surrounded by chamber music. Immediately after
World War II he entered
the Milan Conservatory, where he studied composition with Giorgio
Federico Ghedini, whose neo-Baroque style was an early influence, along
with the music of Stravinsky.

Among his fellow students was the American singer Cathy Berberian, whom
he married in 1950, and with whom he made frequent visits to the United
States, encountering a fellow Italian, Luigi Dallapiccola, at Tanglewood
and electronic music in New York. Under these influences he entered the
modernist stream with works like "Chamber Music" (1953), a set of James
Joyce songs he wrote for Ms. Berberian to sing with clarinet, cello and
harp.

A meeting with another Italian, Bruno Maderna, brought him to the
Darmstadt summer school, the annual meeting place in Germany for the
European avant-garde. He attended regularly between 1954 and 1959, and so
came to know Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti,
Mauricio Kagel among others. Contributing to their endeavors for radical
innovation, he produced his most complicated conceptions, notably "Tempi
Concertati" for flute, violin, two pianos and four instrumental groups
(1958-9).

Other works of this period include his first electronic pieces. He was
co-director with Maderna of a studio for electronic music at the Milan
station of Italian radio and produced one of the early classics of tape
music: "Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)" (1958), based on a recording of Ms.
Berberian's reading from Joyce's "Ulysses." In the same year, with
"Sequenza I" for flute, he instituted a series of solo studies, each
considering the history, performance style and aura of an instrument. By
the time of his death he had composed 14 such pieces, for most of the
standard Western instruments, including the human voice.

As patterns of virtuosity, these pieces often prompted elaboration. For
example, "Sequenza VI" (1967), which has a viola player scrubbing
vigorously at tremolo chords, generated in succession "Chemins II" for
the same viola player with nonet (1967), "Chemins III" for the viola with
orchestra (1967), "Chemins IIb" for small orchestra (1969), a score from
which the original solo viola has disappeared, and "Chemins IIc" (1972),
in which it has been replaced by a bass clarinet. Here Mr. Berio was
using his own music in the ways he often used others' music, as material
to be analyzed, explored, imitated and developed.

Meanwhile, he was pursuing his fascination with the human voice and with
the drama of song. 

Mr. Berio's first composition for the theater, "Passaggio," had its
premiere at the Piccola Scala in Milan in 1963 and was a provocative
expression of its sole female character's subjection to social pressures.
Subsequently his dramatic works became more poetic than political.
"Laborintus II" (1965) is based on an anticapitalist poem by his
longstanding friend Edoardo Sanguineti, but the music provides a
gorgeous, dreamlike flow of imagery for voices and chamber orchestra,
more engulfing than supporting the reciter.

Between 1963 and 1971 Mr. Berio lived largely in New York with his
Japanese-American second wife, Susan. He taught at the Juilliard School,
where he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, and became more active as a
conductor. He wrote "Sinfonia" for Leonard Bernstein and the
Philharmonic, and his first full-scale opera, simply called "Opera," for
the Santa Fe Opera, which produced it in 1970.

In 1972 he returned to Italy, to a house on the edge of the hill town of
Radicondoli, near Siena. In the mid-70's he became a co-director of Mr.
Boulez's computer music institute in Paris, which he left in 1980 to
establish his own facility in Florence, Tempo Reale.

His biggest work of the decade after "Opera" was "Coro," for 40 singers
and 40 instrumentalists (1975-6), an interweaving of folksong-inspired
melodies with massive choral settings of words by Pablo Neruda,
contrasting individual freedom with oppressive authority. He then
returned to opera for two collaborations with Italo Calvino: "Una vera
storia," first performed in
Florence in 1982, and "Un re in Ascolto," written for the 1984 Salzburg
Festival.

Both these works were, like "Opera," deconstructions of the genre. The
first part of "Una Vera Storia" is a theatrical analysis of Verdi's "Il
Trovatore," the second a new synthesis of the discovered musical-dramatic
elements. "Un re in Ascolto," which was given its American premiere by
the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1996, reworks parts of Shakespeare's
"Tempest" in a form in which rehearsal, performance and memory coalesce. 

Narrative is still more dissolved in "Outis," first performed at La
Scala, Milan, in 1996. The opera is loosely based on the myth of Odysseus
and incorporates 20th-century images of assassination, exile and
genocide. "Cronaca del Luogo," performed at the 1999 Salzburg Festival,
was a return to the format of "Passaggio," with a single female character
but now representing the
heroic women of the Hebrew Bible.

The concern with Jewish subject matter in these later operas ? as well as
in the magnificent "Ofanim" for instrumental groups, children's voices,
electronic resources and, again, a solo female vocalist (1988-97) ? was
stimulated by his third wife, the Israeli-born Talia Packer Berio, who
was as important an influence on the music he wrote in his 60's and 70's
as Berberian
had been in his 20's and 30's. Ms. Packer Berio created the libretto for
"Cronaca del Luogo" and also drew her husband's attention to the
symphonic sketches by Schubert that he used in "Rendering" for orchestra
(1988-90).

Other late orchestral works, notably "Formazioni" (1985-7) and "Concerto
II" with solo piano (1988-90), show Mr. Berio's continuing ability to
find new ways for the orchestra to speak, vividly and beautifully, while
solo instruments went on having their say as he extended the "Sequenza"
series. But perhaps his most personal and powerful achievements are works
centered on a solo female voice, all the way from "Chamber Music" to
"Cronaca del Luogo": music that celebrates an individual's capacity, even
in an unhearing world, to go on expressing pathos, love and imagination.

He is survived by Ms. Packer Berio, of Radicondoli and Florence, and by
two daughters, two sons and two grandchildren. 

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