Luciano Berio
Rendering; Echoing Curves > Berio, London Symphony Orchestra (RCA Victor Red Seal 68894)

The classical music market being what it is, I wonder how many copies of a CD like this have actually sold – Berio was a hugely important figure in 20th Century music, but I seriously doubt he has much of a following … maybe 300 copies?

It's hard to say. And it's really a shame that people are so scared of classical music, because so much great music just never gets heard outside of a very small percentage of the record-buying public.

This is a weird disc for a lot of reasons, but it's a totally enjoyable one, and one that I've found myself playing over and over of late. I can't say that I understand it, but I like it, and I'll let the snobs snicker as I attempt to foist Luciano Berio on the masses.

Truly, even serious classical music people tend to be total pussies when it comes to 20th Century stuff – a strong fear of dissonance is characteristic, I suppose (outside of grad school, at least) – but that's where a disc like this one is especially useful.

Berio is all over the map in terms of what he can do stylistically, and he does a very broad range of things very well. He created music of great challenge to the listener as well as unapologetically beautiful music – everything from tape experiments to respectful reconstruction of unfinished scores by the great composers.

This odd disc offers three different sides of Berio in a program which should be extremely incongruous but which is actually quite satisfying. Perhaps listeners who like their CDs to be primarily one style all the way through will be somewhat befuddled, but those who can appreciate Bach as well as Ives will probably find a great respect for Berio after listening to this disc.

The three works on the disc are a recent piano concerto by Berio, a reconstruction of an unfinshed work by Schubert, and a transcription of Boccherini in which Berio literally superimposes four versions of the same work to create a bizarre hybrid of baroque and 20th Century modern classical music.

Concerto II ("Echoing Curves") is the piano concerto – frenetic and a bit frightening, but accessible. It sort of sounds like computer music arranged for chamber orchestra. Very cool.

This gives way to the "Rendering for Orchestra," a piece so achingly beautiful you're left checking the disc to make sure you're listening to the same composer. It's a completion of an unifinished orchestral sketch that Schubert wrote shortly before his death. Berio has even gone so far as to include a passage which brings to life a very simple canon that Schubert jotted down in the margin of the score paper as an exercise in counterpoint.

Apparently Schubert was taking counterpoint classes at the time of his death, and literally wrote this work-in-progress as nothing more than a note-paper doodle, of course never intending to use the little canonic figure for anything serious … but its simplicity emerges from the work like a joyful shout-out to Pachelbel, and that's pretty fuckin' fresh.

There are passages in this "Rendering" that I sometimes play several times in a row before allowing myself to go forward with the disc – beautiful stuff, perfect for people who secretly love Pachelbel but don't want to be caught listening to something so obvious.

The last piece ("Quattro versioni originali della 'Ritirata notturna di Madrid'," yo) presents Berio's superimposition of four different manuscripts of the same chamber piece by Boccherini. Boccherini wrote four versions to suit different instrumentations, and Berio saw the need to simply play them all at once, resulting in a very simple, beautiful baroque orchestral piece that has several harmonic dissonances resulting from the four different, almost identical pieces being played simultaneously.

The "almost identical" angle is what makes the piece so interesting – here and there a noticeable clashing occurs, and it provides what is a fairly straightforward piece a tension that drives it to a totally new place.

This is an ideal disc for people who want to delve into 20th Century classical music and realize that there are composers more substantive than Philip Glass out there to be discovered. It's utterly accessible, but also challenging and moreover, interesting.

It's the rare kind of classical disc that allows the non-scholar to understand what types of advancements have been attempted by postmodern composers. I'd be surprised if more than 500 people will bother buying it, but that's too bad – I'm rapidly finding it to be a must-have.

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Johnnie Bourgeois