Curtis Orchestra embraces the heart of modernism in Berio's 'Sinfonia'
For classical music geeks growing up in the post-’60s artistic tumult (at least, for one geek for whom I can personally vouch), grappling with the avant-garde meant hour after hour replaying the same LP: Berio’s Sinfonia.
For classical music geeks growing up in the post-'60s artistic tumult (at least, for one geek for whom I can personally vouch), grappling with the avant-garde meant hour after hour replaying the same LP: Berio's Sinfonia. Born of the progress and discord of the late 1960s, the Sinfonia was as much a journey inward — how does one test intellectual curiosity? — as an abrasive inquiry into where we were as a society.
Where were we then, and where are we today? And what do music students make of it now? You had to wonder Sunday afternoon, as the orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music made its way through Berio's resonant outbursts and a whirling central movement that remains a great spiritual cosmos. The ensemble raised its usual recurring question about how high a student group's ensemble skills can go, answering unexpectedly. The piece whose excerpts they've no doubt drilled for years, Mahler's Symphony No. 1, fared less well than the technical jigsaw exactitude of the Berio.
The exposed sparseness of Busoni's Berceuse élégiaque was handled with surety in a performance led by Conner Gray Covington, a Curtis conducting student from Maryville, Tenn., who gently but urgently impelled the sweet, spooky lullaby at a mother's bier. The rest of the program was led by Ludovic Morlot, music director of the Seattle Symphony, who was aboard to take the Berio and Curtis to Carnegie Hall Monday night, and then home later this week to turn on Seattle audiences to Berio at Benaroya Hall.
" ... it can't stop the wars, can't make the old younger or lower the price of bread, can't erase solitude or dull the tread outside the door," the audience hears in the notoriously wild third movement of the Sinfonia. What is it all about? The text is a collage of quotes spoken and sung by eight vocalists, pieced together by Berio from Beckett, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and graffiti.
But the greater impact comes from the music, also wrought of quotes, but hung on a more or less continuous framework of the "Scherzo" from Mahler's Symphony No. 2. Debussy, Strauss, Stravinsky, Berg, and Beethoven float by, and it's up to the listener to make connections (or just enjoy the ride).
As an artistic empath, Berio was incredibly canny. The sweet pull of Mahler's moto perpetuo becomes sanctuary, a place from which one can safely consider the dissonance and cacophony of the passing flotsam and jetsam. This movement, nestled within four other movements of sounds that seem to visit from the larger universe, becomes a bewildering snapshot of humanity.
The second movement, "O King," written in memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., also pivots between worlds. Its violent instrumental and vocal pokes are laid out, one by one, like stars piercing the haze.
If Verizon Hall listeners often found it hard to make out the words of the vocalists, that was by design. Though amplified, their sounds were kept low, preserving Berio's concept of the text conveying "different degrees of understanding," and the experience of "not quite hearing." A bit less "not quite hearing" might have been welcome, but the vocalists, prepared by Susan Nowicki and Donald St. Pierre, were expert, as was the orchestra, led with crisp visuals by Morlot.
Authentic Mahler arrived like spring. Morlot maintained an unusually relaxed and quiet character in the first movement's main theme, and in the third movement lent the material just enough klezmer to make the point without caricature. If this piece is a good guide, Morlot is not a conductor to lay too heavy a fingerprint on the score, but instead likes to make his points in lovely smaller gestures. Individual solos were still a bit wobbly in places, but the Curtis orchestra was exceptionally strong as a listening-responding ensemble while letting off a great deal of verve.
Berio's Sinfonia tells us that " ... tomorrow we'll read that Mahler's Symphony No. 1 made tulips grow in my garden and altered the flow of the ocean currents." If not literally true, the thought rang poetically true here and there all afternoon.
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