Music Review | New York Philharmonic: From Berio, The Dark Fraying Ends Of The 1960s

Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia may not be as well known as “Pet Sounds,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” or the Simon and Garfunkel songs for “The Graduate.” But in its way this seminal work from the modernist wing of 20th-century contemporary music is equally emblematic of the 1960s.

Lorin Maazel conducted the New York Philharmonic in a program of Berio and Brahms at Avery Fisher Hall on Wednesday.

The New York Philharmonic can make a claim to the Sinfonia: Berio wrote it for the orchestra, which gave the premiere in 1969 under Leonard Bernstein, to whom the piece is dedicated. Yet the Philharmonic had not played it for 20 years when Lorin Maazel conducted the first of four performances on Wednesday night as part of this season’s focus on Berio.

The public may think of Mr. Maazel mostly as an imposing conductor of standard repertory, but he is at his best in challenging contemporary works. He drew an electrifying, sumptuously colorful and commanding account of this eclectic score from the Philharmonic players and Synergy Vocals, the highly skilled eight-member ensemble that sang the Sinfonia’s experimental vocal component, originally conceived for the Swingle Singers.

The Sinfonia is an all-embracing and ingenious 35-minute symphony in five movements. The piece was both inspired by and a reaction to the tumultuous events of the late ’60s. The music is an uncannily organic swirl of wild impressions. The first movement uses fractured phrases from French texts by the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The second is a rapturous symphonic expansion of an earlier work for voice and chamber ensemble, “O King,” which isolates the phonemes of the name of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated while Berio was working on the piece.

Here the composer tries to neutralize the distinctions between instruments and voices, to make the amplified singing seem instrumental, beyond words. Yet he manipulates, prolongs and transforms the sung syllables in a way that somehow gets to the essence of language.

The program began with the composer Steven Stucky and the Synergy Vocals singers presenting a mini-version of the Philharmonic’s Hear & Now examinations of challenging contemporary scores. With lucid commentary and projected images of the musical score, Mr. Stucky asked the vocalists to demonstrate Berio’s unconventional vocal procedures. Somehow the harmonies the vocalists contribute to the work are at once astringent yet sensuous, constricted yet expansive, fidgety yet timeless, pungently atonal yet sweetly diatonic, like bluesy jazz chords.

The actual performance was mesmerizing, especially the audacious third movement, the core of the piece. Berio quotes the scherzo movement from Mahler’s Second Symphony, using this familiar music as a jumping-off point to scramble and recompose not just the Mahler but also a panorama of musical (and cultural) history.

He slips in snippets of scores from Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony to the Viennese waltz from Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier” to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” The fractured juxtapositions are transformed into a tantalizing and terrifying din. There is nothing glib about it, though, an attitude maintained throughout the final two movements, which summarize the whole.

The program ended with Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. Despite the strengths of the performance, this great work seemed an afterthought following the exhilarating Sinfonia.

The program will be repeated Friday at 11 a.m. and Saturday night at 8 at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center; (212) 721-6500, nyphil.org.

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