BERIO • MAHLER
Mahler: 10 frühe Lieder (arr Berio); Berio: Sinfonia
Matthias Goerne (baritone); Synergy Vocals; BBC Symphony Orchestra/ Josep Pons
Harmonia Mundi HMC 902180 61:29 mins
What a programme: Berio’s orchestrations of Mahler’s early songs sung by Matthias Goerne preface his Mahler-soaked Sinfonia. It’s an illuminating frame in which to encounter the mercurial Modernist: there are moments in the Sinfonia’s third movement – which splices, overlays and explodes the Scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony with the contents of Berio’s brain – when it sounds like a barbaric send-up. But we have only to listen to his exquisite song orchestrations, graced with Goerne on riveting, vibrant form, to feel the depth of his empathy, an almost palpable longing to be absorbed into that lost Viennese world. ‘But now it’s done, it’s over, we’ve had our chance…’, as the speaker observes – an unnamed actor/ singer whose insouciant candour lends such character to this reading.
Berio intuitively harnessed the energies of Mahler’s music so that Debussy’s La mer, Strauss’s Rosenkavalier, Ravel’s La valse and Stockhausen’s Gruppen (to name but four) emerge with absolute inevitability from Mahler’s score, alongside virtuosic contributions from Synergy Vocals, and witty chatter – a prophetic vision of our saturated, overcrowded, individualised 21st-century listening world. It’s an exhilarating tour de force, and Pons finds an almost effortless coherence in this dynamic, artfully-balanced recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It may be at the expense of free-wheeling frenzy, but the nuanced, audible text (Lévi-strauss, Beckett) achieves mordant hilarity – surely Berio’s intention. The first and last sections are fantastically vivid, ‘O King’ luminous and deeply affecting. Recordings of the Sinfonia by Pierre Boulez and the Swingles, and Peter Eötvös and London Voices aren’t replaced, but this coupling is a musthave.