Luciano Berio
Voci

Kim Kashkashian viola
Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra
Luciano Berio conductor
Robyn Schulkowsky percussion
Recorded November 1999, ORF Studio, Vienna; May 2000, Teldec Studio, Berlin
Engineers: Josef Schütz and Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Voci (1984) was among the first works I ever heard by Luciano Berio (1925-2003), and one that affected me deeply from the first. Its inaugural gesture of bells and viola is not unlike the cadenza that introduces Ravel’s Tzigane in its unadulterated physicality. It rings in the air like the Sicilian street calls, lullabies, and folk music that inspired it. Kashkashian carries full orchestral weight in her bow, keening her way through epic travels. Fragmentary dances and incantations trade hands, carving circuitous paths around the piece’s elusive center. Its colorful blend of percussion, winds, and strings is a pastiche of rusticity that brims with almost excessive totality. This is not the careful revelry of the attentive archivist, but rather the unrest of the enraptured reinterpreter. In a fitting stroke of programming, producer Manfred Eicher includes five field recordings from the very regions that so entranced the composer. Of these, the lament is inescapably moving. After this dive into “agro-pastoral” authenticity, we return to land in Naturale (1985), which combines the composer’s own song recordings with viola and percussion. Though more than just a Voci redux, its effects are almost identical, drawn as they are from the same starting point.

As Berio would have been the first to admit, the “cannibalization” process by which these strains made their way into his meticulous constructions remain free from romantic visions of preservation and speak to a process of linear progression in the continued search for new directions through the fusion of disparate paths. We can be thankful that some of those paths lead straight into our ears.