Search - Luciano Berio, Ensemble Musique Vivante, Christiane Legrand :: Luciano Berio: Laborintus 2

Occasionally entertaing, but much more dated than his other

Christopher Culver | 09/06/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Luciano Berio, who ultimately took a place alongside Schnittke and Ligeti as a titan of 20th-century postmodernism, was just as inspired by the operatic tradition of his native Italy and Dante as he was by the innovations of musical modernism and electronic experimentation. LABORINTUS 2 for narrator, two sopranos, contralto, and chamber ensemble, written in 1965, is one of his earlier efforts linking present and past. Here we are fortunate to have the composer himself conducting the work, with poet Edoardo Sanguineti as narrator, three French singers, and the Ensemble Musique Vivante.



The work, running 33 minutes in length, is split into two parts. The first opens with random vocalizations from the singers, while the narrator quotes from Dante, Eliot, Pound, and the Bible, and Sanguineti himself. The ensemble is entirely out of sync with the singers, and the narrator is oblivious to it all, resulting in a chaotic but strangely beautiful combination vaguely like Ligeti's "Aventures" or, more closely, the last movement of Berio's "Sinfonia". One comes to understand the title very well, one is trapped in a maze of musical styles and eras and there's no reconciliation in sight. The second movement, the shorter of the two by a few minutes, is even more incongruent, opening with jazz and seguing into bleep-bloops electronic sounds about which Berio had great curiosity in those days.



Many have seen "Laborintus 2" as prototypical of Berio's 1968 work "Sinfonia" for jazz singers and orchestra, which also blends quotations from various composers and alludes to all manner of musical eras. However, I'm sorry to say that "Laborintus 2" is quite dated. "Sinfonia" still retains much of its power, especially in the recent recording on DG with the Goteborgs Symfoniker led by Peter Eotvos. At its lowest points, "Laborintus 2" seems like that most stale of 1960s musical events, the "happening". It's fun to take this down from the shelf once in a while, but listening to is an experience more comic than awe-inspiring.



Not only is the music not Berio's best, but one gets only thirty minutes of music, which doesn't make this disc much of a bargin in spite of its lower pricing. If you are looking for an introduction to this generally fascinating composer, get the DG recording of "Sinfonia" or the mid-price Sony disc collecting five of his concertos."

Wild, distjointed, wordy, experimental, italian, jazzy, poet

Discophage | France | 04/20/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I'm not sure I should say so (they'll never let me out of my mental asylum if they find out about this review!), but I love Berio's Laborintus 2. It dates from 1965 and it is scored for 3 female voices, one speaker and a chorus of 8 (the traditional soprano-alto-tenor-baritone, but the score cryptically adds: actors, rather than singers), plus instrumental ensemble. It uses texts collated by the Italian writer Eduardo Sanguinetti, by Dante, Eliot, Pound and Sanguinetti himself. The composer conceived it as a stage work: The composition's entry on Universal's catalog says that Laborintus 2 can be played as "theatrical event, story, allegory, documentation, pantomime etc in theatre, concert, TV, open air and so forth", and fact is, it has been staged, but staging it would require from the director a wide stretch of the imagination. In fact, it is closer to a hörspiel - a radio play, an opera for the ear rather than for the eye. I don't have the score, but I suspect that the recording wasn't played through but collated from various sessions and improvisations, and edited and pasted together. You even hear (and obviously Berio kept it on purpose), at the end of part 1 and the beginning of part 2, the performers' comments as if caught "off the air", including a "time to go to bed!" (on va se coucher!). I wonder what the score looks like. There have been recent performances, mostly unstaged.



Although I've not found any explanation of it (and the liner notes are not very helpful), the very title points to the piece's experimental nature: "Laborintus" is, I s'pose, a concatenation of Labyrinth and Laboratory. Quite appropriate. Now, why "2 " and where is No. 1, I know not. So, the music is pretty radical and experimental. The language is fully contemporary (1960s contemporary, I mean, which makes it even more "contemporary" than today's contemporary), but without any of the dryness often associated with serialism from the 1960s. It is wild, busy with seemingly disjointed and arbitrary events - some of them piercing and violent, some of them delicate and gossamer - that somehow coalesce into a seamless continuity. At times it verges on free jazz improvisations (and many members of the recording ensemble are indeed today more associated with jazz than with classical and contemporary music, such as clarinetist Michel Portal, percussionist Bernard Lubat, double-bassist Jean-François Jenny-Clarke and vocalist-soprano Christiane Legrand, a member of Mimi Perrin's famous French "Double Six" Jazz vocal group and later of the original Swingle Singers, along with alto Claudine Meunier). In part 2 there is a part for tape, but I find them much better embedded into the instrumental texture, much less hackneyed and clichéd than much tape music from those years (or today).



But beware: all those traits which make this piece so attractive to me - the wild disjointedness, the accumulation of events, the wordy hodge-podge of texts - are those, I suspect, that will make most listeners hate it. Two additional features I find especially lovable in Laborintus. The wonderful lyricism of its three female voices - and kudos to Christiane Legrand, Juliette Baucomont and Claudine Meunier. And its marvelous Italian-ness - wordiness and all. It is great to have Eduardo Sanguinetti himself as speaker. It all conjures memories of films of Antonioni, Fellini and you name `em.



True, those Harmonia Mundi bargain series didn't offer much music (33-minutes here), no translation of text and, as already mentioned, liner notes that are not very informative. So try and find it cheap. This recording, made under the composer's supervision circa 1970, is history.

"