Concertino for clarinet, violin, celeste, harp and strings
Allegretto — Vivace - Allegretto
The Italian composer Luciano Berio came from a family of organists and originally trained as a pianist until an accident to his hand at the age of 19 put an end to his ambitions as a performer. Reading law at Milan University, he pursued simultaneous studies in composition at the Milan Conservatoire, and gained his composition diploma in 1950 at the age of 25. Meetings with Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood (1951) and with Bruno Maderna and Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt (1954) helped him formulate his personal style, and after early experiments in electronic music he has gone on to produce a sizeable body of instrumental and vocal works. They include a series of Sequenze for solo instruments, the operas Opera and Un rè in ascolto, and the celebrated Sinfonia (1965-9). His mature music combines a spirit of radical experimentation with a strong sense of instrumental colour, an unmistakably "Italianate" lyricism and a profound sensitivity to musical tradition. Along with the Sinfonia, (which incorporates an extraordinary musical collage based on the second movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony), his Italian Folk Songs (1964-1973), and arrangements of works by composers as diverse as Boccherini and John Lennon have made Berio one of the most frequently-performed of contemporary composers.
The Concertino (1949) dates from Berio’s student years, and was one of his very first published compositions. As is to be expected from a 24-year old composer, it displays his early influences; in Berio’s case his teacher Giorgio Ghedini (1892-1965), a distinguished but now largely forgotten Italian composer who had, post-war, moved away from a late-Romantic idiom and embraced the influence of Stravinsky. The scholar Claudio Annibaldi identifies Stravinsky filtered through Ghedini as the principal stylistic influence in the Concertino, but certain of its traits are very typical of the mature Berio — the controlled energy, the virtuosic solo writing, and the magical colours and textures he creates using his extremely unusual line-up of solo instruments. The Concertino is in three basic sections, played without a break.
R. G. Bratby 2001
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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