Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia

The musicians of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia plunge into contemplative and ecstatic waters in Claude Debussy’s ‘La Mer’ before they join their shipmates, the singers of London Voices, and embark with Luciano Berio’s ‘Sinfonia’ on a voyage “across the Mediterranean of Western music” in the words of its composer. The mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená also reveals Berio’s musical discoveries in his ‘Folk Songs’.

Luciano Berio, born by the sea in Italy in 1925, dreamed as a boy of being a sea-captain. This dream was to come true in a different way: composing music, concludes Berio, is a lifelong journey in which he has headed for one port after another. And his ‘Sinfonia’ – composed in the troubled year of 1968, marked by the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the May uprising in Paris, that he spent as professor of composition in Oakland with first-hand experience of the Flower Power-movement – can be understood as a documentation of “found material”. Berio uses it as a platform on which to mount a variety of literary and musical quotations, weaving round them a glittering web of vocal and instrumental sounds.

Like the rippling water of a river that forges its way through varying landscapes, disappearing at times into a subterranean channel and reaching the light of day somewhere completely different, the music of Gustav Mahler keeps constant company with the ‘Sinfonia’.

Luciano Berio saw the third movement as an act of homage to Mahler, whose “Second Symphony seems to bear within it the whole course of music history”. Berio set quotations from Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, Alban Berg’s ‘Wozzeck’, Claude Debussy’s ‘La Mer’ and from many other interrelated works and transformed them into something like Baudelaire’s ‘Voyage à Cythère’, a musical “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art) that he dedicated to Leonard Bernstein.

Berio’s spirit of discovery comes out again in the song cycle he wrote four years earlier, his ‘Folk Songs’: taking songs from America, Sicily, Sardinia, France, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Berio sets them in a new context. “I keep coming back to folk music and trying to create links between it and my own ideas and conceptions of music. My approach to the folk songs is often highly emotional: when I work with the music, I always feel the joy of discovery.”

Sinfonia (1968/69)

for eight singers and orchestra

in five movements

Folk Songs (1964)

for mezzosoprano and 7 instruments (1964)

La mer (1903 – 1905)

Three symphonic sketches for orchestra

1. De l’aube à midi sur la mer

2. Jeux de vagues

3. Dialogue du vent et de la mer