Sinfonia (for 8 voices and orchestra)

Luciano Berio Sinfonia For 8 Voices And Orchestra

Luciano Berio
Sinfonia for 8 voices and orchestra
I 00:00
II – O King 06:19
III – In ruhig fliessender Bewegung 11:20
IV 23:49
V 27:13

New Swingle Singers
Ward Swingle, conductor
Orchestre National de France
Pierre Boulez, conductor

Painting: Louis Janmot, The Golden Stairway, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts

Sinfonia (Symphony) was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed in 1968–69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, it is a musically innovative post-serial classical work, with multiple vocalists commenting about musical (and other) topics as the piece twists and turns through a seemingly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The eight voices are not used in a traditional classical way; they frequently do not sing at all, but speak, whisper and shout words by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose Le cru et le cuit provides much of the text, excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.
Leonard Bernstein states in the text version of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures from 1973 that Sinfonia was representative of the new direction classical music was taking after the pessimistic decade of the sixties. […]
Extract from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinfoni…