Luciano Berio - Chamber Music

Chamber Music, for female voice, clarinet, cello & harp (1953)

I. Strings in the Earth and Air
II. Monotone
III. Wind of May

Marco Lazzara, alto
Lucia Rosati, clarinet
Giovanni Scaglione, cello
Alessandra Magrini, harp

Chamber Music for female voice, clarinet, cello, and harp is one of Luciano Berio's first important pieces. He wrote the three settings of James Joyce poems in 1953 for soprano Cathy Berberian, who was his wife at that time. Although Chamber Music is basically twelve-tone, Berio's use of the technique avoids many of the prevailing ultra-controlled applications of serial systems. While Berio's work, as with the work of his close colleagues, is informed by the system that was so pervasive among the 1950s avant-garde, he rarely used twelve-tone techniques in an orthodox fashion. Instead, he applies this technique as a set of tools with which to create a given composition's internal hierarchies. Chamber Music is a case in point: Berio's flexible use of a twelve-tone row and its permutations (inversion, retrograde, and so on) allows for repeated note cells or closely cycling fields of pitches comprising only part of the row, for example.

A lyric element evident in the vocal line and inherent in the row itself may be traced in part to Berio's contact with Luigi Dallapiccola -- the most lyric of serialists -- at Tanglewood, in the summer of 1952, and through studies of the older composer's scores. In general terms, the textures of Chamber Music tend toward the austere quality of Webern, pointillism, the supple application of dynamics, and the note-by-note shifts in instrumentation known as klangfarbenmelodie. Berio's choice of the poetry of James Joyce and the almost theatrical stance of each setting evince the composer's wide-ranging interest in the modernist literature, which is quite evident in Laborintus II, Sinfonia, La vera storia, and other pieces. The three poems are "Strings in Earth and Air," "Monotone," and "Winds of May." "Strings in Earth and Air," the longest of the three settings, begins with harp and voice; cello and harp join in rhythmically prosaic contrapuntal accompaniment. Only the voice takes a consistently lyric line, with more subtle rhythms and a well-shaped line. The ensemble fills out the serialized harmonic field. Berio sets much of "Monotone" on a single pitch, with an arpeggiated flourish for effect later in the song. The brief setting of "Winds of May" is spoken in the beginning and the end, while the middle lines have a windy word-painting that is matched throughout the song by quick, blustery instrumental writing.

The settings of Chamber Music are deft, and although they don't match the complexly connected text-and-music pieces found in Berio's career, the melodic lines, contrapuntal accompaniment, and flexible use of the twelve-tone armature represent a step along the way to his mature style. [allmusic.com]

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