Sinfonia

Luciano Berio’s enigmatic and subversive Sinfonia is at once a time capsule of 1960s counterculture, politics and art, and a reevaluation of the symphony as a genre. Deeply self-reflexive, the piece is aware of its own status as an artistic construct that owes its existence, at least in part, to the masterpieces it explicitly refers to, with Mahler as the crown jewel. Sinfonia is structured in five continuous movements—the last added after the 1968 premiere by the New York Philharmonic—and scored for large orchestra and eight amplified voices that sing, speak and whisper excerpts from the writings of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and from Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, among other sources. The eerie first movement interlaces the chorus and speaker with agitated woodwinds, fragmented strings and a restless electric harpsichord, adding to what initially strikes the listener as incongruous juxtapositions. In the second movement, "O King", the ethereal chorus sings the disassembled units of sound that make up the spoken name of Martin Luther King Jr. Bearing the tempo indication of the scherzo from Mahler's Symphony No. 2, the dense third movement is the Sinfonia’s emotional centrepiece. Berio uses the Mahler as the template for a phantasmagoric sound collage, quoting Beethoven, Debussy, Boulez and himself along the way. The simultaneous snippets of text have the effect of a warped newsreel detached from logic, with the singers interrupted by violent bursts of tone clusters. The last two movements refer to what has come before, not as a formal conclusion but rather as a self-conscious interrogation about the point of the piece. It is a question the curious listener is left to ponder.