Monday Music Selection #1
Jul. 26th, 2021 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveTime for some music -
Edgar Varèse - Amériques (Original 1921 Version)
Version by the
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly
Luciano Berio - Rendering per orchestra, da F. Schubert (2. Andante)
Conductor - Riccardo Chailly · Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi
Luciano Berio - Sinfonía (Symphony)
Electric Phoenix and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly.
I - 0:00
II - O King. Immobile e lontano: 5:55
III - In ruhig fließender Bewegung - attacca: 10:21
IV - 21:35
V - 24:53
Sinfonía is a musically innovative work with vocalists commenting about musical topics as the piece twists and turns through a seemingly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The voices are used in a non-traditional way; they do not sing at all, but speak, whisper and shout words by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose "Le cru et le cuit" provides much of the text, excerpts from Samuel Beckett's novel "The Unnamable", instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.
In the first movement, Berio uses texts from "Le cru et le cuit" (The Raw and the Cooked) by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The form of the piece is also inspired in him, who in his work on mythology had found 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, and Berio himself said that he used this form in his Sinfonía.
The second movement is based in another work: In 1968, Berio completed O King, a work dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King. This movement exists in two versions. The orchestral version of O King uses a fair amount of whole-tone scale motives. (which also appears in the quote from Le Sacre du Printemps in the third movement)
In the third movement, Berio lays the groundwork by quoting multiple excerpts from the third movement (scherzo) from Mahler's Symphony No. 2 and has the orchestra play a slightly cut-up, re-shuffled and occasionally re-orchestrated version of it. Many have described it as a "musical collage", in essence using an "Ivesian" approach to the entire movement (American composer Charles Ives in his Symphony No.2 first used musical quotation techniques on a grand scale at the turn of the 20th century).
The orchestra plays snatches of Claude Debussy's La Mer, Maurice Ravel's La Valse, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, as well as quotations from Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Johannes Brahms, Henri Pousseur, Paul Hindemith, and many others (including Berio himself) creating a dense collage, occasionally to humorous effect. When one of the reciters says "I have a present for you", the orchestra follows immediately with the introductory chord from Don, the first movement from Pli selon pli by Pierre Boulez.
The quoted fragments are often chosen because they bear a rhythmic or melodic likeness to Mahler's scherzo. For example, Berio uses a violin line from the second movement of Alban Berg's violin concerto with chromatically descending sixteenth notes two measures before a similarly descending line appears in Mahler's scherzo. This is then accompanied by another violin descent, taken from Johannes Brahms' violin concerto. The text from Beckett at this point begins, "So after a period of immaculate silence there seemed", but, instead of continuing the quotation ("a feeble cry was heard by me"), Berio substitutes the words "to be a violin concerto being played in the other room in three quarters" and then, after the Berg quotation, alto 2 insists on "two violin concertos", at the point where Berg is interrupted by Brahms.
The eight individual voices simultaneously recite texts from various sources, most notably the first page of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. Other text fragments include references to James Joyce, a graffiti Berio noticed during the May 1968 protests in Paris and notes from Berio's diary. Berio himself describes the movement as a "Voyage to Cythera", in which a ship filled with gifts is headed towards the island dedicated to the goddess of love.
The brief fourth movement is a return to the tonality of the second, relatively serene after the frenetic third movement. It begins again 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.
The fifth movement was added by Berio a year later, intended to balance the first four. The movement revisits the text from the previous sections, organizing the material in a more orderly fashion to create what Berio calls "narrative substance." It opens with a quotation from Lévi-Strauss that is at the same time a veiled reference to Mahler's second symphony: the fifth movement of Sinfonií opens with the words "rose de sang" (French for "rose of blood"), and the fourth movement of Mahler's symphony begins with the words "O Röschen roth!" (German for "O red rosebud!").
ENJOY
Edgar Varèse - Amériques (Original 1921 Version)
Version by the
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly
Luciano Berio - Rendering per orchestra, da F. Schubert (2. Andante)
Conductor - Riccardo Chailly · Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi
Luciano Berio - Sinfonía (Symphony)
Electric Phoenix and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly.
I - 0:00
II - O King. Immobile e lontano: 5:55
III - In ruhig fließender Bewegung - attacca: 10:21
IV - 21:35
V - 24:53
Sinfonía is a musically innovative work with vocalists commenting about musical topics as the piece twists and turns through a seemingly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The voices are used in a non-traditional way; they do not sing at all, but speak, whisper and shout words by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose "Le cru et le cuit" provides much of the text, excerpts from Samuel Beckett's novel "The Unnamable", instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.
In the first movement, Berio uses texts from "Le cru et le cuit" (The Raw and the Cooked) by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The form of the piece is also inspired in him, who in his work on mythology had found 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, and Berio himself said that he used this form in his Sinfonía.
The second movement is based in another work: In 1968, Berio completed O King, a work dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King. This movement exists in two versions. The orchestral version of O King uses a fair amount of whole-tone scale motives. (which also appears in the quote from Le Sacre du Printemps in the third movement)
In the third movement, Berio lays the groundwork by quoting multiple excerpts from the third movement (scherzo) from Mahler's Symphony No. 2 and has the orchestra play a slightly cut-up, re-shuffled and occasionally re-orchestrated version of it. Many have described it as a "musical collage", in essence using an "Ivesian" approach to the entire movement (American composer Charles Ives in his Symphony No.2 first used musical quotation techniques on a grand scale at the turn of the 20th century).
The orchestra plays snatches of Claude Debussy's La Mer, Maurice Ravel's La Valse, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, as well as quotations from Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Johannes Brahms, Henri Pousseur, Paul Hindemith, and many others (including Berio himself) creating a dense collage, occasionally to humorous effect. When one of the reciters says "I have a present for you", the orchestra follows immediately with the introductory chord from Don, the first movement from Pli selon pli by Pierre Boulez.
The quoted fragments are often chosen because they bear a rhythmic or melodic likeness to Mahler's scherzo. For example, Berio uses a violin line from the second movement of Alban Berg's violin concerto with chromatically descending sixteenth notes two measures before a similarly descending line appears in Mahler's scherzo. This is then accompanied by another violin descent, taken from Johannes Brahms' violin concerto. The text from Beckett at this point begins, "So after a period of immaculate silence there seemed", but, instead of continuing the quotation ("a feeble cry was heard by me"), Berio substitutes the words "to be a violin concerto being played in the other room in three quarters" and then, after the Berg quotation, alto 2 insists on "two violin concertos", at the point where Berg is interrupted by Brahms.
The eight individual voices simultaneously recite texts from various sources, most notably the first page of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. Other text fragments include references to James Joyce, a graffiti Berio noticed during the May 1968 protests in Paris and notes from Berio's diary. Berio himself describes the movement as a "Voyage to Cythera", in which a ship filled with gifts is headed towards the island dedicated to the goddess of love.
The brief fourth movement is a return to the tonality of the second, relatively serene after the frenetic third movement. It begins again 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.
The fifth movement was added by Berio a year later, intended to balance the first four. The movement revisits the text from the previous sections, organizing the material in a more orderly fashion to create what Berio calls "narrative substance." It opens with a quotation from Lévi-Strauss that is at the same time a veiled reference to Mahler's second symphony: the fifth movement of Sinfonií opens with the words "rose de sang" (French for "rose of blood"), and the fourth movement of Mahler's symphony begins with the words "O Röschen roth!" (German for "O red rosebud!").
ENJOY
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