On track: Music for body and soul

Perhaps it's an Italian thing, sorting out priorities and not neglecting body pleasures. Little wonder this was the country which gave the world chianti, pasta and Italian opera. Little wonder, too, that in the 1950s and 60s, Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) always seemed so much more inviting a figure than Stockhausen and Boulez.

While the German and the Frenchman toted up their figures and formulae, Berio always turned to sound as a source of sensuous pleasure.

To start with, the man was smitten with the human voice, writing works such as Circles (1960), Sequenza III (1966) and Thema (1958) for his wife, the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian.

Thema, which is an electronic rhapsody created from Berberian reading James Joyce, impressed the young Paul McCartney when he came across it in the mid-60s. Berio echoed the Englishman's admiration by writing an over-the-top arrangement of Ticket to Ride for Berberian.

Leonard Bernstein's recording of Berio's 1968 Sinfonia introduced us to the postmodernist mix decades before it colonised the world of art theory. The New York Philharmonic and the Swingle Singers joined forces in an extraordinary melt of Martin Luther King and radical student protest alongside the music of Mahler, Strauss and Ravel.

Most importantly for us in this part of the world, the disc received a local release. It turned many of our heads towards new and exciting possibilities.

Berio continued to be drawn to the transcription and reworking of other men's music, although he would always describe the act as "analysing" rather than straight arrangement. The year 1964 brought forth Folk Songs which included a crystalline I wonder as I wander and a passionate Black is the Colour of My True Love's Hair. Twenty years later, he orchestrated Brahms' two clarinet sonatas, and 1989's Rendering was based on sketches for Schubert's Tenth Symphony.

Berio's last projects saw him completing Puccini's unfinished Turandot and working at a re-orchestration of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea for Los Angeles Opera.

There has not been a lot of Berio's music performed in New Zealand concert halls although, in 1984, soprano Wendy Dixon gave us his 1971 Recital I at the Takapuna Pumphouse, one of Jannette Heffernan's many innovative presentations. However, if we must then resort to recordings, some fine ones are available.

First up is the 1999 Deutsche Grammophon three-disc set of the complete Sequenzas which is indispensable, as various Ensemble Intercontemporain performers from flute to accordion prove themselves more than able to meet Berio's virtuosic challenges.

While the Bernstein recording of the Sinfonia still awaits a CD release, Pierre Boulez's 1992 Erato account of the work is available and worth pursuing. Cathy Berberian's various CDs may be difficult to find.

The most recent Berio CD to come my way is Kim Kashkashian's extraordinary ECM recording of Voci and Naturale.

These works of the mid-80s, both based on Sicilian folksong, feature the American violist as an eloquent protagonist, weaving her line in and out of Berio's tantalising web of sound.

The first score uses instrumental accompaniment, the second limits itself to percussion, along with Berio's own field-recording of a folksinger. Manfred Eicher sets up shimmering soundworlds for both (the disc was up for a Grammy this year), and also on offer are six archival Sicilian folksong recordings, which may well be the most immediate pathway into the disc.

Luxuriating in Berio's swirling sonics, especially in Voci, I can't help but recall Mark Swed's description of the composer's music as "a kind of ocean of voices and instruments with everchanging focus in which one regularly gets lost and then finds oneself again".

The world has lost one of its greatest luminaries, a composer with that rare and enviable ability to write music that could touch both the body and the soul.

*Ensemble Intercontemporain, Berio Sequenzas (Deutsche Grammophon, 3-disc set, 4570382)

* Kim Kashkashian, Berio: Voci (ECM 1735)