Berio: Laborintus 2

1. Laborintus II, for 3 voices, 8 actors, speaker, ensemble & tape Part 1
Composed by Luciano Berio
with Janette Baucomont , Musique Vivante Ensemble , Christiane Legrand , Claudine Meunier , Edoardo Sanguineti

2. Laborintus II, for 3 voices, 8 actors, speaker, ensemble & tape Part 2
Composed by Luciano Berio
with Janette Baucomont , Musique Vivante Ensemble , Christiane Legrand , Claudine Meunier , Edoardo Sanguineti

Tracks:

Laborintus 2: Premier Partie
Laborintus 2: Deuxieme Partie

Customer Reviews:

Occasionally entertaing, but much more dated than his other works.......2006-09-06

Luciano Berio, who ultimately took a place alongside Schnittke and Ligeti as a titan of 20th-century postmodernism, was just as inspired by the operatic tradition of his native Italy and Dante as he was by the innovations of musical modernism and electronic experimentation. LABORINTUS 2 for narrator, two sopranos, contralto, and chamber ensemble, written in 1965, is one of his earlier efforts linking present and past. Here we are fortunate to have the composer himself conducting the work, with poet Edoardo Sanguineti as narrator, three French singers, and the Ensemble Musique Vivante.

The work, running 33 minutes in length, is split into two parts. The first opens with random vocalizations from the singers, while the narrator quotes from Dante, Eliot, Pound, and the Bible, and Sanguineti himself. The ensemble is entirely out of sync with the singers, and the narrator is oblivious to it all, resulting in a chaotic but strangely beautiful combination vaguely like Ligeti's "Aventures" or, more closely, the last movement of Berio's "Sinfonia". One comes to understand the title very well, one is trapped in a maze of musical styles and eras and there's no reconciliation in sight. The second movement, the shorter of the two by a few minutes, is even more incongruent, opening with jazz and seguing into bleep-bloops electronic sounds about which Berio had great curiosity in those days.

Many have seen "Laborintus 2" as prototypical of Berio's 1968 work "Sinfonia" for jazz singers and orchestra, which also blends quotations from various composers and alludes to all manner of musical eras. However, I'm sorry to say that "Laborintus 2" is quite dated. "Sinfonia" still retains much of its power, especially in the recent recording on DG with the Goteborgs Symfoniker led by Peter Eotvos. At its lowest points, "Laborintus 2" seems like that most stale of 1960s musical events, the "happening". It's fun to take this down from the shelf once in a while, but listening to is an experience more comic than awe-inspiring.

Not only is the music not Berio's best, but one gets only thirty minutes of music, which doesn't make this disc much of a bargin in spite of its lower pricing. If you are looking for an introduction to this generally fascinating composer, get the DG recording of "Sinfonia" or the mid-price Sony disc collecting five of his concertos.

Insane, wonderful, marvellously inventive.......2003-04-29

Where else could you summon up a chorus, three sopranos, a speaker, three harps and something that sounds like a jazz orchestra?

This piece specialises in some amazing vocal effects that have to do with the extension of vibration and note into time, like arrows flying through the air. There are instruments that actually finish a note that a singer STARTS, and then transforms it into a complex phrase, thus morphing and shape shifting the original utterance in a most amazing way.

The piece is lots of things - a ceremony - and a sequence of chants, piercing, beautiful moments of clear sound, curious tangles of notes from the harps, and (on this recording) the patient voice of Eduardo Sanguinetti. He sounds very old, and his very distinctive voice lends a unique and strange texture to a piece that is dominated by vocal brilliance by three members of the Swingle Singers (if you didn't recognize the names).

I have a copy of the score of Laborintus II, and while this performance is unmatched by any live performance I have ever seen to date, it is NOT the same exactly as the printed score.

Here you can actually hear the musicians break off at the end of the first section puzzlingly speaking to each other in French, and laughing "oh..je suis tres termine!", and this is most definitely not scored.

The beginning of the second piece according to the score should have the ensemble playing some extended jazz improvisations, Sanguinetti pronouncing some Dantesque poetry, the three singers and chorus doing equaly fascinating things, but the recording contains some quite different ideas, all of which work, and are ahout as insane and engaging as anything Mr Berio has ever invented. The piece seems to be something like one of the happenings that the Grateful Dead were involved in, and for all we know, perhaps everyone was so mellowed out that that is essentially what has been captured here.

I've seen the piece performed twice. In both cases it was different, so in no way do I have a real handle on what the true, or platonic ideal really should be.

It's also very challenging working out from the score how the various parts key together, but just listening this is a treat.

I first encountered this in Hatfield in a student dive where there was some marvellous blue smoke and squashy furniture and some buffs from teh science fiction society, who thought that it was completely crazy, and we all did, and I'm happy I met it that way. Any of you guys out there, please get back in touch!

Berio CD is a Find.......2002-08-16

As a fan of the music of Luciano Berio, I'm always on the look-out for recordings I might have missed.I was delighted to find this one. Laborintus 2 combines many elements such as the sung word, the spoken word, progressive classical and jazzelements to form a new concept in theatrical music. The performance on this CD took me by surprise. How could I have missed itbefore? There might be one small gripe, the lack of a text and translation. But I assume that that was to keep the price down.Anyway, don't you missout on this.

a worthy companion to "Sinfonia".......2001-04-21

Berio's "Sinfonia" (1968) is probably his most famous piece. It's often named as his masterpiece, sometimes even as the greatest piece written after World War II. "Laborintus II" (1965) is also an amazing piece of music, though, and I think it makes an excellent companion to the later work. Both are pieces for a large group of instruments and a small group of vocalists. Both have a theatrical element. Both use the human voice in unconventional ways. Both were written in the 1960s. Both are breathtakingly beautiful, unabashedly modern, and unlike any music that came before. Despite these similarities, though, the pieces are hardly identical. While "Sinfonia" is in five movements, only one of which exceeds 10 minutes, "Laborintus II" divides its 33 minutes into only two sections. While the former is highly structured, the latter is more free-form and through-composed. While the former is very focused and much of it is static, the latter is all over the place and can be overwhelmingly propulsive. And the "Sinfonia"'s third movement, based on a Mahler scherzo and containing a huge number of quotations, finds its equivalent in "Laborintus II" with the opening of the second movement, which takes off like an avant-garde jazz piece which soon dissolves into spatterings of tape-music in one of the most effective uses of electronics I've ever heard.

Tracks:

Laborintus 2: Premier Partie
Laborintus 2: Deuxieme Partie

Customer Reviews:

Occasionally entertaining, but much more dated than his other works.......2006-09-06

Luciano Berio, who ultimately took a place alongside Schnittke and Ligeti as a titan of 20th-century postmodernism, was just as inspired by the operatic tradition of his native Italy and Dante as he was by the innovations of musical modernism and electronic experimentation. LABORINTUS 2 for narrator, two sopranos, contralto, and chamber ensemble, written in 1965, is one of his earlier efforts linking present and past. Here we are fortunate to have the composer himself conducting the work, with poet Edoardo Sanguineti as narrator, three French singers, and the Ensemble Musique Vivante. One should note that this recording has been reissued at mid-price by the same label.

The work, running 33 minutes in length, is split into two parts. The first opens with random vocalizations from the singers, while the narrator quotes from Dante, Eliot, Pound, and the Bible, and Sanguineti himself. The ensemble is entirely out of sync with the singers, and the narrator is oblivious to it all, resulting in a chaotic but strangely beautiful combination vaguely like Ligeti's "Aventures" or, more closely, the last movement of Berio's "Sinfonia". One comes to understand the title very well, one is trapped in a maze of musical styles and eras and there's no reconciliation in sight. The second movement, the shorter of the two by a few minutes, is even more incongruent, opening with jazz and seguing into bleep-bloops electronic sounds about which Berio had great curiosity in those days.

Many have seen "Laborintus 2" as prototypical of Berio's 1968 work "Sinfonia" for jazz singers and orchestra, which also blends quotations from various composers and alludes to all manner of musical eras. However, I'm sorry to say that "Laborintus 2" is quite dated. "Sinfonia" still retains much of its power, especially in the recent recording on DG with the Goteborgs Symfoniker led by Peter Eotvos. At its lowest points, "Laborintus 2" seems like that most stale of 1960s musical events, the "happening". It's fun to take this down from the shelf once in a while, but listening to is an experience more comic than awe-inspiring.

Not only is the music not Berio's best, but one gets only thirty minutes of music, which doesn't make this disc much of a bargin in spite of its lower pricing. If you are looking for an introduction to this generally fascinating composer, get the DG recording of "Sinfonia" or the mid-price Sony disc collecting five of his concertos.

Track Listings:

Track Listings

track listings

Track Listings

Golden Era of the 60's

Moussorgsky: A Night on Bald Mountain; Dvorak: Symphony No. 9, "From the New World"

Les Incontournables [Import] [Limited Edition] [Original recording remastered]

Music: Glorious Gospel

Live at the BBC [CD-single] [Import]

Listen Closely [Explicit Lyrics]

Live in America [Live]

Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 26, 27, 29, 32 & 43

Lonesome Hearted Blues [Import]

I'll Always Love You

Ltd Edition 6-CD Singles Box #3 [Box set] [Import] [CD-single]

Love Songs [Import]

Live Mixtape V.2 [Import]

Beethoven Symphonies

Destination Failure