From RCA ARL1-0037: This album presents six of Luciano Berio's shorter vocal pieces, written over a period of 20 years. Not the least remarkable aspect of this music is the continuity of thought that lies behind it; although the earliest composition- El Mar la Mar-is the work of a young man of 27, it already bears unmistakably the stamp of its creator. Indeed, it shares with the newest piece here, E Vó (1972), an important feature: both are stimulated by the sound and atmosphere of folk music. Since all of the pieces involve the human voice, it would seem relevant to touch, if only briefly, upon Berio's highly individual approach to the setting of words in general. He has never believed in the traditional syllabic method of setting a poetic text to music, because he feels that entails an inevitable dividing line between the meaning of the text and the sound of the music. instead, he has always preferred a more analytical process in which sound and meaning are fused through the use of the actual sound properties of the text as acoustical material permeating all layers of the musical structure. O King, for instance, is based entirely on a gradual "discovery" of the name Martin Luther King, which evolves from an exposition of its vowel sounds (a-i-u-e) into the complete name, heard only during the final bars of the piece. In addition, the hard "k" sound of "King" is suggested throughout in the sudden fortissimo attacks that emerge from the otherwise pianissimo dynamic level. (And here we meet another important facet of Berio's vocal art: the breaking down of the conventional barriers between vocally and instrumentally produced sounds. For Berio the human voice is itself an instrument of almost limitless possibilities, and an exploration of the common ground between vocal and instrumental lines forms the basis of several of his works, including Agnus.) In Melodrama the component vowels of a fragment of German text by Heine are again used to form an important layer of the composition. Even in the early El Mar la Mar we find, in the second song, that the mezzo-soprano sustains the "a" sound of the key word "mar" as a means of extending the soprano's vocal line. El Mar la Mar was not the first work in which Berio attempted to evoke the flavor of folk music, but it was one of the very first pieces in which he really found himself as a composer. Most of his earlier works, including Magnificat (1948), Concertina (1950) and the Two Pieces for violin and piano of 1951, are regarded by him as "exorcisms"-a means of ridding himself of the influence of such 20th-century masters as Bartok, Stravinsky and Hindemith. El Mar la Mar, on the other hand, is a completely individual piece, even though it combines its origin in folk music (these are particularly noticeable in the inclusion of an accordion in the instrumental clothing) with the seeds of the serial technique that was to preoccupy Berio, as well as other outstanding composers of his generation, during the early '50s. The texts of El Mar la Mar are taken from "Un Marinero en Tierra" ("A Sailor on Land"), an early collection by the exiled Spanish poet, Rafael Alberti. As in many of Alberti's poems, their central symbol is that of the sea. The three texts Berio chose play phonetically on the Spanish word "mar'- the first wistfully, the second dramatically and the third humorously. They are scored for soprano and mezzo-soprano, with a small instrumental ensemble consisting of piccolo, two clarinets, accordion, harp, cello and double bass. The main characteristics of O King have been discussed above. The piece was written in 1968 as a form of threnody for the murdered civil rights leader. Harmonically, O King is very simple, being based largely on two whole-tone scales. Like Agnus, it treats its vocal line not in a soloistic manner but simply as a part of the overall instrumental texture (this integration is further enhanced by the fad that toward the end of the piece the instrumentalists themselves can be heard speaking the sounds with which the singer's "text" had begun). O King is recorded here in its original chamber scoring for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano; Berio later made an amplified version for eight voices and orchestra, and in this form it appeared as the second movement of his Sinfonia The remaining four pieces all have their origin in Berio's stage work, Opera. Opera (the word is used in its literal sense of "works") has been described by the composer as a "celebration of endings." It consists of an almost cinematic cross-cutting between three parodied dramatic elements whose link is the fatality of their subjects: the Orpheus legend, the sinking of the Titanic and the terminal ward of a hospital (this last setting deriving from a production by the New York Open Theater). The title of Melodrama refers to a musical form fusing speech and music that goes back as far as the grave-digging scene in Beethoven's Fidelio and the Wolfs-Glen music in Weber's Der Freischütz. More often, however, melodrama denotes a composition for speaking voice and piano. There are examples of such pieces by Schubert and Schumann-and above all, Richard Strauss' dramatic treatment of Tennyson's poem "Enoch Arden." Nearer our own time, Schoenberg was fascinated by the melodrama, and his use of Sprechgesang (notably in Pierrot lunaire and Ode to Napoleon) may be seen as an off-shoot of the genre. Berg's Lulu also contains an important melodrama. Berio's Melodrama is basically a parody of such pieces; within the context of Opera it relates to the episodes concerning the Titanic and can be heard as an attempt at giving a public performance by a nervous and decidedly tourist-class artist (for this reason, the recording incorporates some less than discreet audience participation). The ensemble accompanying the singer is the type of band that might well be found on a large ocean liner: piano, electronic organ, percussion, flute, clarinet, cello and bass. The piece falls into two parts: in the first the performer attempts a rendering of part of a poem by Heine, the second note of which-a top G-presents him with an apparently insuperable problem; the second part develops toward a continuous lyricism, and here the artist, no longer weighed down by words or by the need to give a "performance" (he seems now to be singing to himself), is able to sing freely. Like Berio's Recital I, Melodrama moves from an inherently schizophrenic situation (the violent contrast between the Heine text and the deliberately cliché-ridden narrated incidents) toward a newfound tenderness and compassion. Harmonically speaking, the first part grows gradually outward in both directions from its pivotal note of G (the electronic organ, for instance, slowly builds up a held cluster throughout this section) until a point of maximum complexity is reached; the second section, by contrast, is harmonically static The alliterative spoken text of Melodrama is by Berio himself. Agnus and E Vó are both connected with an incident in Act II of Opera. A group of children is seen crossing and re-crossing the stage in an ever more tightly knit formation. Finally they run on screaming and are systematically slaughtered before the audience's eyes. It is at this point that Agnus begins. As in O King, the voices are treated as an integral part of the overall texture of the piece (and their complete integration is assured by their disposition on the platform: the two sopranos are placed between the three clarinets). Again as in the earlier piece, the words of Agnus are revealed only gradually during the course of the music. And like so many of Berio's works, Agnus sets out deliberately to destroy the distinctions between vocally and instrumentally produced sounds: the effect of the sopranos' changing vowel sounds on one note, for example, is paralleled by the clarinetists' producing a subtle change of color by playing the same note with alternative fingerings, and the rapid "dental" tremolos of the singers simulate the sound of instrumental fluttertonguing. Agnus revolves around the central pitch of B-flat, and the music is given an ethereal resonance, so to speak, through the additional presence of a high-pitched note-cluster that is sustained on an electronic organ throughout the piece. In Opera; Agnus is immediately followed by E Vó. A woman picks up the body of one of the slain children and, rocking it in her arms, begins to sing this lullaby to a traditional Sicilian text. The flavor of a piece of folk music is conveyed first through the nasal manner in which the music is sung and secondly by the quarter-tone inflections of an on-stage solo viola. The music begins calmly enough, but it soon becomes tense and then desperate. Unlike Melodrama, which displays a similar process of accumulation, E Vó has a "closed" structure, finally returning to the subdued mood of its opening. Although Air is related to the Orpheus element of Opera, it is the one dramatic component of that work that does not end disastrously. At the beginning of each act a singer is seen being coached in the performance of a song; her interpretation slowly improves until at the start of Act IV she is able to perform the entire piece. The words of this Air are by Alessandro Striggio, taken from the prologue of his libretto for Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. Berio's piece (recorded here in its chamber version for soprano, piano, violin, viola and cello) begins with the simultaneous exposition of three seemingly irreconcilable compositional layers: a florid, melodious vocal line; a chord deep down on the muted strings, and a piano part consisting of sharp staccato chords over a smoothly moving left-hand line. As the piece progresses, the frequency band formed by the strings' cluster moves gradually upward, beginning to incorporate on its way snatches of material derived from the soprano line; Furthermore, the held notes of the strings break up into a tremolo that itself slows down until by the end of the piece its rhythm matches that of the singer. A similar process is applied to the piano. Even so, this gradual resolution and synthesis is in a sense contradicted by the very nature of Air the ceaseless repetition of patterns in the vocal line serves only to emphasize the falseness of the music's surface gaiety. -MISHA DONAT THE LONDON SINFON1ETTA: Flute and Piccolo: SEBASTIAN BELL Clarinets: ANTONY PAY, ROBERT HILL, ROGER FALLOWS Harp: SIDON1EGOOSSENS Piano: JOHN CONSTABLE Electric Organ: HAROLD LESTER Accordion: IVOR BEYNON Percussion: JAMES HOLLAND, KEVIN NUTTY Violin: NONA LIDDELL Viola: BRIAN HAWKINS Cellos: JENNIFER WARD CLARKE, CHARLES TUNNELL (Melodrama only) Double Bass: ROBIN McGEE From Decca Head 15: Swingle II Olive Simpson, Catherine Bott, sopranos Carol Hall, Linda Hirst, mezzo-sopranos John Potter, Ward Swingle, tenors John Lubbock, David Beavan, basses Recorded July 1976 in Decca Studio 3, West Hampstead, London Recording producer: James Mallinson Recording engineers: Martin Smith and Stan Goodall These "Cries of London" for eight voices (two sopranos, two altos, two tenors, two bases) are a re-working of the composition of the same name written in 1974 for the "King's Singers" (two countertenors, one tenor, two baritones, one bass). In this new version the "Cries of London" becomes a short cycle of seven vocal pieces of a folk nature in which a simple piece regularly alternates with a musically more complex one and where the fifth "cry" is the exact repetition of the first (the text of which is also used in the third "cry"). The seventh piece, "cry of cries," is a commentary on the preceding "cries": although it uses the same melodies and the same harmonic characteristics it is musically detached as if recalling them from a distance... As a whole this short cycle can also be heard as an exercise in characterization and musical dramatization. The text is essentially a free choice of well-known phrases of vendors in the streets of Old London.