Berio - Coro (1976)

Luciano Berio's Coro is a large scale composition for forty voices and forty instruments.
Coro was written at a time when, according to Berio, "the blood in the streets of Italy came out", partly due to the Years of Lead. Berio, a composer committed to social issues, often expressed his views and described the composition's central theme to be "the acute awareness of things at a tragic moment. On this line, he referred to Coro as being a tribute to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. In his opinion, Neruda was "practically murdered (not physically, but spiritually); they broke his heart. [...] It is an invitation to be aware of the violence of the times, Fascist violence".
The distinction between individual and mass music is made clear in the use of two different kinds of text. On the one hand, Berio turned to folk poetry in various languages for the solo episodes. These folk utterances are often translated from a wide range of languages and dealt with very different topics, from love and death to the oneness between man and nature. All of these songs are authorless. For example, the initial episode in which a soprano is gradually joined by four other sopranos and five contraltos is based on an American Indian text, "Today is mine".
On the other hand, Berio used a different textual source for mass episodes, which is taken from a work by Chilean author Pablo Neruda. Here, the process is reversed: whereas in the previous episodes the poetry from different peoples are assigned to individual singers, in the case of Neruda, his poetry is here sung by all forty singers in the massive tuttis which are the pillars of this piece. Only a few fragments are taken from the poet's three-volume Residencia en la tierra (1933-1947). The most recurring cry in the piece, "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" ("Come and see the blood in the streets"), is taken from the final verses of one of the poems included in this collection, entitled Explico algunas cosas ("A few things explained"). This cry appears many times throughout the piece as a refrain.
Although the work is largely based on folk material, Berio used no direct quotations or transformations of actual folk songs, aside from movement 6, where he used a Croatian melody, and movement 16, where he quoted a melody from his own Cries of London. Berio used, in addition to this folk element, a wide range of musical avant-garde techniques. He divided the piece into 31 "self-contained and often contrasting episodes" and made clear that the same piece of text is used in several different parts of the piece with different music, whereas the same musical model can also occur several times with different texts. To the end of enhancing acoustical and visual interactions among voices and instruments, he envisaged a very specific placing of the singers and instruments on the stage, with a singer each sitting next to an instrumentalist of roughly comparable timbre and range, forming a semicircle. According to Berio, the harmonic level is perhaps the most important one, since it is the work's base but is at the same time its environment and its slowly changing landscape.
Live performance from the Prinzregententheater, Munich on 1 April 2017.
MusicaAeterna - chorus master Vitaly Polonsky
Mahler Chamber Orchestra - cond. Teodor Currentzis

[@omicroneridani7456]

One of Luciano's most impressive works.

[@machida5114]

sodelicious...................

[@EpifanesEuergetes]

Interesting and impressive. Thanks for uploading.

[@rubenmolino386]

Going off topic a bit!,,,,, hello Master..a question,...I have seen in several places how you can get the appropriate place from the!! golden zone! ,...but this once the piece is finished...and with the last bars of the count in hand,....ok! ......but how is the golden zone determined a priori? ,...one knows where it starts,..but not where it ends...number of bars ???.....how does Bartok come up with...create that zone,,in some calculation from the beginning? ? ......I did not see this anywhere! ...a hug Master!!

[@ContemporaryClassical]

Are you referring to the Golden Ratio? Erno Lendvai argues that this is present in Bartok, and others that it's in Debussy, eg La Mer, but without suggesting that Debussy was aware, as far as I know. I believe Erik Satie consciously worked out those proportions in some pieces.... And btw, I believe in the old Anarchist adage "no gods, no masters"! 😄

[@rubenmolino386]

@@ContemporaryClassical tank you !!