Search - Luciano Berio, Arditti String Quartet :: Luciano Berio: The String Quartets

Masterpieces of modern composition and performance

R. Hutchinson | a world ruled by fossil fuels and fossil minds | 10/31/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Arditti Quartet's superb set of Berio's complete works for string quartet is #38 in the Arditti Edition on Montaigne, and it is one of the finest yet, along with the recordings of Xenakis, Nono, Reynolds and Rihm (see my reviews of the Nono and Reynolds discs). These are complex, knotty works with no easy reference for the tonally-oriented ear, and the Arditti Quartet performs them with startling precision and intensity!



There are two long quartets, "Notturno" (1993) and "Sincronie" (1963-4), presented in that order, and then two shorter works, "Glosse" (1997) and "Quartet No. 1" (1956). Following the others, the 1956 work sounds the most random, the purest example of using the new serialist language to utterly pulverize all conventions, leaving a fragmented pointillism. Several years later, with "Sincronie," Berio produced a masterpiece. This 18" piece develops a clearly perceptible form, based not on pitch, but on timbre, clusters, and "gestures," both sonic and formal. "Sincronie" represents the emerging innovative voice of Berio, which he would develop in the solo works known as "sequenza," and the elaborated concerti which included the "chemins" series (see my 6/29/03 review of "Chorale/Chemins" with Boulez on Sony).



The two later works from the 1990s are written in a style that incorporates Berio's intervening interest in folk music and his synthesis of the pre-modern with the high modern, a fascinating contrast with his earlier music (see my 7/28/02 review of "Voci" with Kim Kashkashian on viola). "Notturno," especially, features lyrical and tonal passages emerging from and returning to dense atonal complexity.



This is not easy music by any means, but I find it both beautiful and powerful. I hope that some of the seemingly numerous devotees of the Kronos Quartet will open their ears to this disc (see my latest Kronos review, 10/31/04, of the 4th Quartet by Vasks). It is my impression that there are a number of Kronos fans who devour anything that ensemble does, but are limited in their wider appreciation of contemporary music. But I think Kronos should be seen not as a final destination but rather as a door through which you might pass and find yourself in a world of wonders! Take a step, and see what awaits..."

Not a powerful genre for a powerful avant-gardist

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 12/05/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Many times a performance(s) and the interpretive insights brought to the work transcends the actual music itself. The genre of the string quartet I don't think is the place where Berio has found his powerful creative voice, as he has done with his oeuvre for voices, as Laborintus,Circles,Epiphanies,Coro, and the various operas. The relative sterile repository of the string quartet genre seems an opposite lifeworld,one where refined bourgeois concepts are placed away from the everyday business of the world of the avant-garde and finding your place within it,as Berio has resoundingly done.



I like here really his early music to give a perspective of where he came from, and how Berio had to search deeply into his culture ,the mileau of post-war Italy,where ugly remainders of leftover fascism still was part of the agenda for Italian artists, writers and composers.Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino,Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna being the others.



The early Quartet here from 1956 is a wonderful piece still feeling the "energy" the adoption of a new post Webern language that hasn't outlived itself yet. Berio here speaks with an "excited" voice, of a newly found pathway. a language of densitiesregistral timbres, extended techniques as Am Steg, sul ponticello, snapped Bartok pizzicati,generous utilizations of harmonics and percussive effects.All were part of an exciting pallette for the new. The early "Five Pieces for Piano Solo"(written in the early Fifties) also exhibits this new unrestrained beauty,a dodecaphonic dimension that would soon see its demise, in favor of a more powerfully wrought language as Berios' "Epiphanies" for Female vocalist and large orchestra.



The "Sincronie" is the first developed work but again the four strings seems an ill-suited habitate that Berio doesn't quite feel at home in as the piano solo genre as well where he really never discovered a voice either. "Sincronie" however has a richer pallette of timbres,now he did have a numer of works under his belt as the early "Sequenzas" for FLute Solo and Female Voice Solo.



Arditti simply play the hell out of this music, you will not find a more convincing interpretation of clean threadbare lines tossed neatly into all registers with a great deal of conviction and purpose.There is an interpretive problem in that the players do need to maintain an edge to the music,not to simply make everything, every moment "pretty" or immediately pleasurable. We can speak in these terms for Berio did in fact choose the most unresistant path for the avant-gardist language. Berio no matter what he writes always had a stated richly timbral directedness. It is immediately engaging music,where timbral colours seem to be unbounded not curtailed and allowed to free themselves continuously as they(the sounds) unfold in time. I personally find Berio to have opted for the simpler paths for this language,the facile and the immediately recognizable.Yes it is engaging and fascinating and interesting, but you always feel that another more vigorous path is there waiting left-of-stage to be developed. There are no unanswerable questions thrown into the creative conceptual mix of this music, as say his brethren had exhibited as Nono and Maderna, even their mentor Luigi Dallapiccola had a more complex convoluted means where he situated his music and how it unfolds."