Four Centuries of Great Music October 19, 2025 Centennial of the Birth of Luciano Bario

This week are both the centennial of the birth of Luciano Berio, born on October 24, 1925 in the Oneglia district of Imperia, Italy along the Ligurian coast of Italy, and the bicentennial of the birth of Johann Strauss II born on October 25, 1825 in Neubau, Vienna, Austria.  So this week on Four Centuries of Great Music, I am celebrating the life and the music of Luciano Berio and next week on Four Centuries of Great Music, I will be celebrating the life and the music of Johann Strauss II.    

Again, Luciano Berio, born on October 24, 1925 in the Oneglia district of Imperia, Italy along the Ligurian coast of Italy.  He was taught piano by his father and grandfather, who were both organists. During World War II, he was conscripted into the army, but on his first day, he injured his hand while learning how a gun worked and spent time in a military hospital.   After the war, because of his hand in injury, he studied composition at the Milan Conservatory rather than piano.  While at the Milan Conservatory,  Berio made a living at this time by accompanying singing classes, and it was in doing this that he met the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, whom he married shortly after graduating. Berio wrote a number of pieces that exploited her distinctive voice.  

In 1952, Berio went to the United States to study with Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood, from whom he gained an interest in serialism. He later attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt, where he met Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel. He became interested in electronic music, co-founding the Studio di fonologia musicale, an electronic music studio in Milan, with Bruno Maderna in 1955. One of the most influential works he produced at the Studio di fonologia musicale was Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958), based on Cathy Berberian reading from James Joyce's Ulysses, which can be considered as the first electroacoustic composition in the history of western music made with voice and elaboration of it by technological means.

Lets listen to a performance by Luciano Berio of his Thema - Omaggio a Joyce
Acousmatrix - The History of Electronic Music VII
BV Haast Recordings 

In the 1960s, Berio returned to Tanglewood, this time as Composer in Residence; took a teaching post at Mills College in Oakland, California on an invitation from Darius Milhaud; taught at the Dartington International Summer School; taught at the Juilliard School, and there he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, a group dedicated to performances of contemporary music. 

In 1968, Berio completed O King a work which exists in two versions: one for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the other for eight voices and orchestra. The piece is in memory of Martin Luther King Jr., who had been assassinated shortly before its composition. In it, the voice(s) intones first the vowels, and then the consonants which make up his name, only stringing them together to give his name in full in the final bars.  This was incorporated into his orchestral work Sinfonia (1967–69), for orchestra and eight amplified voices, as the second movement.

Sinfonia is in five movements.  The first movement is untitled but based upon French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss book The Raw and the Cooked) which postulates that many myths were structured like musical compositions, with some myths having a "fugal" form and others resembling a sonata. One mythical transformation however, had a structure for which he was not able to find a musical equivalent.  Berio said that he used this form as the first movement in his Sinfonia.

The second movement is O King.

The third movement has quotes from Schoenberg, Mahler, Debussy, Hindemith, Ravel, Berlioz, Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Johann Sebastian Bach, Berg, Beethoven, Boulez, Webern and Stockhausen.

The fourth movement begins with a Mahler quotation—the chorus taken from the end of the "Resurrection" symphony. The voices make use of various vocal effects, including whispers, syllabic fragments, and distortions of previous textual material.

Then the fifth movement revisits the text from the previous sections, organizing the material in a more orderly fashion to create what Berio calls "narrative substance".

Here is a performance of Luciano Berio Sinfonia by Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot with the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth from the album  Berio: Sinfonia - Boulez: Notations I-IV - Ravel: La valse, M. 72 
Seattle Symphony Media


Points On the Curve to Find... for Piano and 22 Instrumentalists (1974)
Ensemble InterContemporain, conducted by Pierre Boulez & Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
Berio: Chemins II & IV, Points On the Curve to Find
Sony


Il Ritorno degli snovidenia for cello and thirty instruments (1977)
Pierre Boulez, Ensemble InterContemporain & Pierre Strauch
Berio: Chemins II & IV, Points On the Curve to Find
Sony


SOLO for trombone and orchestra (1999), dedicated to trombonist Christian Lindberg
Christian Lindberg, Peter Rundel & Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra
Berio - Xenakis - Turnage: Trombone Concertos Dedicated to Christian Lindberg
Naxos

Among Luciano Berio’s most famous works are the Sequenza series of virtuoso works composed for solo instruments. The first, Sequenza I came in 1958 and is for flute; the last, Sequenza XIV Composed in 2002 is for cello. These works explore a wide range of possibilities of each instrument, often calling for extended techniques.

We will close today’s Four Centuries of Great Music celebrating the life and the music of Luciano Berio on the centenary of his brith, October 24, 1925 with Sequenza XIV for Cello featuring cellist Rohan De Saram from the album Berio: The Complete Sequenzas, Alternate Sequenzas
 Mode Records