Sequenza I for Solo Flute by Berio Riccorenze for Wind Quintet by Berio Rendering by Berio

Only Connect... Sequenza I for Solo Flute by Berio; Riccorenze for Wind Quintet by Berio; Rendering by Berio Review by: David Osmond-Smith The Musical Times, Vol. 134, No. 1800 (Feb., 1993), pp. 80-81 Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1002409 . Accessed: 15/09/2012 16:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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Music reviews

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is a telling coincidence that the new score of Berio's Sequenza I for solo flute should become available within a few months of the death of the man for whom it was written. Through long association with the Darmstadt summer schools, Severino Gazzelloni became the catalyst for a distinctive style of flute-writing - elegant, quixotic and sensual - that crystallised into exemplary form in Sequenza I. The original 1958 version of this score was presented in proportionalnotation and published in this form by Suvini Zerboni. Based on a temporal grid, against which Berio could plot fluid rhythms with accuracy, it challenged Gazzelloni to create apparentspontaneity out of disciplined score-reading. Unfortunately, not all of the many flautists who subsequently took up the work have fully grasped that challenge. Some, indeed, have imagined that proportionalnotation was an inivitation to quasi-improvisatoryrubato. Berio has therefore rewritten the score in conventional notation - a version recently published by Universal Edition. It makes for vivid reading: the music leaps

LUCIANOBERIO: POLEMICIST OF THE INCOMPLETEPhoto Universal Edition

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off the page in a way that the less conventional Suvini Zerboni score does not suggest. Yet there is a price to be paid. The fluid spring of the original resolves into simpler relationships, often suggesting an underlying quaver or crotchet pulse for a few seconds. The conventional use of beams to join smaller rhythmic units into quaver and crotchet groups encourages a very different view of structuralpriorities within the phrase. It would be interesting to hear performancesfrom the two notations side by side: I think one could tell them apart. Subsequent Sequenzas have revealed the range of Berio's imaginative sympathy for wind players (he was after all himself a clarinetist during his student days), but only recently has he turned his attention to wind ensembles. And it is precisely considerations of ensemble that predominatein Ricorrenze for wind quintet (1985-87): even though the members of the quintet are spaced at least two metres apart, the flamboyant writing of the Sequenzas is here held in check. Individual melodic strandsleap between instruments,often clouded for a moment by heterophonic interaction. As in so many of Berio's recent works, the background pace is set by a gradual evolution in harmonic resources. It is spare, sophisticated writing, well aware of the wind quintet's backgroundin diversion, and a far cry from the d rebours approachto the medium adoptedby Schoenberg. Although Berio has often showed his skill as an orchestrator, Rendering (1988-90) takes up the more complex issue of how we respond to composers' sketches: in this instance the Symphony in D major D.936A upon which Schubert was working during the final weeks of his life. In calculated opposition to those musicologists who propose to 'complete' unfinished works by an exercise in pastiche, Berio underlines the fragmentary nature of his materials. He likens his procedure to that of modern fresco restorers who, while seeking to revive the colour on surviving painting, make no attempt to fill in portions that have flaked away, but instead leave them empty. The filling or 'rendering' (one of several possible meanings for his punning title) is not however the musical equivalent of neutral plaster. Instead, Berio creates a 'connective tissue', a dense orchestral polyphony, always distant, always quiet, but shot through with allusions to Schubert's late works, notably the final piano sonata, Winterreise and the B flat majorTrio. Schubert worked his sketches for the D major Symphony on two, sometimes three staves. In order to allow the score reader

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full opportunity to explore, Universal Edition have printed Schubert's often skeletal original below Berio's realisation. Berio adopts the same orchestralforces and instrumentalstyle as did Schubert in the 'Unfinished' Symphony, though adding the alien sound of the celesta to underline the advent of 'connective tissue', where strings expand into a divisi cloud. Schubert sketched three movements: an opening allegro, a slow movement, and a fast duple movement, presumablythe finale. All are far from complete. Indeed, the materials for the first would seem to consist of two alternative sketches for an exposition, and a coda. The first exposition is abandoned as it reaches a second theme poised between mediant minor and dominant (after the manner of the Ninth Symphony). The second, startingfrom just before the transition, follows the same skeletal outline as the G major string quartet:a cadence on iii leaping straight into V for an extended second subject that veers into IIIb and back again. Both have the same restless air of plotting out wide tonal tensions, and Berio's realisation does not attempt to mitigate the tentative, exploratorynatureof the sketches as they emerge from, and resolve back into his 'rendering'. The Andante in B minor offers a more distinctive musical statement,lent consistency by the fact that the second group, in F sharp minor, grows out of the bassoon countersubject to the opening theme. With an air of quiet desolation, the opening melody comes repeatedly to rest upon the supertonic, prompting Berio to explore the analogy with the organ-grinder'stune from the final song of Winterreise. Two weeks before he died, Schubert arrangedto start counterpointlessons with the theorist, Simon Sechter, and it is in the last movement that this new-found enthusiasm comes fully to life. The angular melody that he employs has an almost Slavonic character,underlined by obses-

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sive reiterations. But Schubert seems bent upon thematic integration: the first episode that follows echoes the first movement's main theme. Here, too, one may suspect that Schubert was weighing up alternatives. The two sketches that make up the bulk of Berio's movement follow similar key schemes but use different subsidiary materials. They are followed by vigorous fugal perorations (again two, again perhaps alternative). The provisional nature of these fragments means that one should not take Berio's suggested parallel with the restorationof a fresco too literally. Apart from the Andante, which at least suggests a ternarygroup, there is no sense of overall structureto lock each fragment into place. On the other hand, Berio's polemic against the compulsion to complete may well strike a chord with a generation reared less upon the concert-hall, with its enforced concentrationupon 'whole' works, than upon indefinitely repeatable and interruptible domestic listening. Art-lovers have long been willing to put the fragment or sketch within a frame, and enjoy its sense of the virtual as much as - in some instances more than - the 'complete' work that it heralds. Berio's Rendering asserts the same possibility for music.

Berio. SequenzaIfor solo flute. Edizione Suvini ZerbonilUniversalEdition, ?7.60. Berio. Riccorenzefor wind quintet. Universal Edition, ?24.75. Berio. Rendering. Universal Edition, ?62.10

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VERSIONS OF BERIO'S FLUTE SEQUENZA. TOP: THE ORIGINAL VERSION (1958),

IN UNMETRED, PROPORTIONAL NOTATION.

BOTTOM: THE NEW VERSION (1992),

IN CONVENTIONAL

NOTATION. MUSIC EXAMPLES COPYRIGHT EDIZIONE SUVINI ZERBONI AND UNIVERSAL EDITION, REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF UNIVERSAL EDITION

February 1993

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