Just weeks before his death, Luciano Berio completed Stanze (2003), a five-movement composition for voice and orchestra on poems by Paul Celan, Giorgio Caproni, Edoardo Sanguineti, Alfred Brendel (better known as a pianist than as a poet), and Dan Pagis. This valedictory work is pure Berio, instantly recognizable in its continually shifting layers, sly musical quotations and allusions, fleeting gestures, startling interpolations, and dissolving textures; and its sustained twilight mood resembles the elegiac tone of his most ...
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Just weeks before his death, Luciano Berio completed Stanze (2003), a five-movement composition for voice and orchestra on poems by Paul Celan, Giorgio Caproni, Edoardo Sanguineti, Alfred Brendel (better known as a pianist than as a poet), and Dan Pagis. This valedictory work is pure Berio, instantly recognizable in its continually shifting layers, sly musical quotations and allusions, fleeting gestures, startling interpolations, and dissolving textures; and its sustained twilight mood resembles the elegiac tone of his most celebrated work, Sinfonia (1968). Where that piece summed up a turbulent decade, Stanze appears to sum up a fascinating life. Even though Berio's meditations on God and death are rather free of rage or resignation -- neither posture is particularly suited to the composer's dry wit and sense of irony -- he is nonetheless probing and questioning of life's meanings, and supplies the texts with fairly unsettling, provocative music. Rendering (1988-1989) is a tongue-in-cheek fleshing-out...
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