The boundaries of future and past

Kate Molleson explores Berio’s last decades back in Europe and discovers how he kept pushing the boundaries of new music, even as he looked increasingly to the past.

To celebrate the centenary of his birth, Kate Molleson explores the life and music of one of most influential figures in all of modern music – Luciano Berio. Berio’s music is lyrical and expressive, while never ignoring the most advanced techniques and technologies of his time. He worked with many key figures in 20th Century music while always following his own, very individual path, both through life and in his music, where he constantly pushed at and broke the boundaries he encountered. During this week, Kate looks in more depth at some of these limits: the boundaries he was conditioned to recognise in his youth, the boundaries and possibilities of the human voice, the boundaries of other people, the boundary of Europe’s cultural scene, and the boundaries of the musical past and the musical future.

In Friday’s programme, Kate explores Berio’s final decades back in Europe and finds him still pushing at the boundaries of new music, even as he looks increasingly to the past. After the six years living in America, Berio moved back to Italy to an idyllic estate with vineyards and fruit trees. However, he didn’t slow down on the work front, running Pierre Boulez’s new electronic studio IRCAM and then founding a new studio of his own in Florence. Italy during this period was politically volatile, and Berio also wrote music which addressed that, as well as developing a new preoccupation with the past, and working on completions of unfinished works by Puccini and Schubert.

E si fussi pisci
Les Cris de Paris
Geoffroy Jourdain, condcutor

Sequenza IX
Alain Damiens, clarinet

Coro (excerpt)
Cologne Radio Chorus
WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne
Herbert Schernus, conductor

Rendering (2nd mvt, Andante)
American Symphony Orchestra
Leon Botstein, conductor

Altra voce
Monica Bacelli, mezzo-soprano
Michele Marasco, flute
Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology

Produced by Sam Phillips for BBC Audio Wales & West